Paws and special effects

There aren’t many actors who can convincing utter a line like: “I didn’t defy every natural law there is just to lose you again.”

Nicolas Cage could probably swing it, and I’m going to throw in Meryl Streep because she can do anything. But in this case it drips, one syllable at a time and in glorious monotone, from the lips of Keanu Reeves in the trailer for Replicas.

Reeves stars as Will Foster, a brilliant neuroscientist whose wife (Alice Eve) and children are killed in a car crash that somehow leaves him without a scratch. So he builds robotic duplicates of them — or creates clones; the trailer isn’t clear on this point — and then uploads their memories into these creatures.

The trailer also features someone asking Reeves’ character: “What if something horrible goes wrong?” Which sounds like a screenplay gone off the rails. Isn’t a horrible thing gone wrong a kind of double negative?

If all this proves too confusing, a simpler night at the movies is suggested by the trailer for A Dog’s Way Home. If that title and the film’s conceit — an adorable pooch, played in bubbly voice-over by Bryce Dallas Howard — seems familiar, that’s because it comes from the same writers as last year’s A Dog’s Purpose. That one presented the theological notion that no dogs go to heaven, and neither do they have to be cloned or brought back in robot form, because they already reincarnate and will even find their way back to past masters in need of life lessons.

In A Dog’s Way Home it’s just one dog’s life as Bella — played in the flesh by a rescue dog named Shelby — gets separated from her owner (Jonah Hauer-King) and has to travel hundreds of kilometres through dangerous terrain, surviving avalanches, wolves and even a cougar, although the big cat seems to have watched Disney’s The Incredible Journey, and decides to help Bella get home.

Neither Replicas nor A Dog’s Way Home was screened in advance for Canadian critics. That doesn’t bode well, but you never know. They might defy every natural law there is just to be good.