Gemini Man (2019): Written by
David Benioff, Billy Ray, and Darren Lemke, directed by Ang Lee.
Starring: Will Smith, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Clive Owen, and
Benedict Wong. Running Time: 117 minutes.
Rating: 2/4
It
sure looks like 2019 will end up as a turning point in the use of
de-aging effects in movies. Attempts to cheat Father Time have
always been part and parcel of the cinematic toolkit, but rapid
improvements in digital technology have allowed an awful lot of
big-name, big-budget films to go farther than ever before with the
concept. Already we've seen the Marvel films increasingly rely on
it, most notably in Captain
Marvel,
as well as the IT
franchise, of all things. Plus, Scorcese's The
Irishman
is starting to make the rounds, a film that has been hyping its
de-aging of Robert De Niro since pretty much the moment production
was announced.
Until
that film is finally on Netflix, though, us plebes are stuck with
Gemini Man, the latest from noted auteur Ang Lee. As a
general rule, anyone with as varied and interesting a filmography as
Lee's taking a turn at using new tech like de-aging CGI and HFR is
bound to at least be interesting and memorable. Sadly, Gemini Man
does not succeed at being either.
The
plot, such as it is, feels like a tired repeat of the pat several
decades of spy thrillers-meet-sci fi. Will Smith is #TheBest at
shooting things, until he begins to suspect he's getting too old to
do the job anymore, and decides to settle in to a quiet retirement.
Of course, it's not that easy (is it ever?), and a serious of
double-crosses by his erstwhile employers leaves his associates dead
and him on the run with another soldier, Dani (Mary Elizabeth
Winstead), caught up in the crossfire. It turns out Smith is a loose
end in need of un-loosening, and his former boss, Clay Varris, soon
dispatches a mysterious expert assassin to eliminate him once and for
all.
If
you've seen any film in a similar vein from the past three decades,
you know exactly what comes next; the young up-and-comer is a clone
of Will Smith that Varris had made in secret and had been raising as
his own son to be an even better, more hard-hearted soldier than the
"original." Soon, the race is on to connect with the clone
and convince him to help the main characters instead of kill them, so
as to prevent.....I don't know, military intervention in Yemen?
Even
if you've never seen another before, this entire story will still be
wholly obvious if you saw even one trailer for this, because the
film's marketing was patently terrible. This is one of those moves
you can only see in spite of its ads, not because of them. That only
goes so far as an excuse, though. There are plenty of great films
that got stuck with terrible, too-revealing trailers, but as long as
there is something beyond the barebones of the plot worth seeing, an
audience will find it eventually.
Gemini
Man, however, has no such luck; there is nothing of substance or
surprise to be found anywhere here; what you saw in the trailers, you
get here. I kept waiting for something, anything, in the film to
really grab me, but that moment never came. Not that the film is
actively bad or incompetent; the resolution provided by the High
Frame Rate gives some very beautiful shots, and the action scenes
were intense and impressive as far as big-screen spectacles go. If
this were not a year in which we'd gotten a John Wick entry,
certain moments from this movie would have been candidates to top a
Best Action Scene list.
Unfortunately,
any visual flair the film occasionally shows is immediately dampened
down when the focus returns to the characters and we have to suffer
through another round of painfully inane dialogue. It's like the
script had, at one point, interesting and unique aspects to it, but
someone took sandpaper to the thing right before shooting and ground
anyway any line or phrase that would have let the characters stand
apart in any way from the stock stereotypes they're based off of.
There is one particular line involving cilantro that, within the
conext of the film, ranks as one of the deadest line drops I can
remember witnessing in a movie theater.
The
actors aren't able to save much either. Will Smith is perfectly
fine- he usually is- but the character doesn't give him much room to
bring his usual patented charisma into play. Apparently, he and Tom
Cruise were the only two people Ang Lee said he would make the movie
with, since both are longstanding action stars that, like the main
character of the film, are hard-pressed to stave off the advances of
Old Father Time. Fun fact- my screening of this movie was preceeded
by a trailer for the upcoming Top Gun: Maverick. I assume
this was the nostalgia-indulging ago booster Cruise opted for in leui
of doing Gemini Man. I honestly can't say which of the two
did themselves less of a favor.
In
the end, this is another of those movies that exist; they begin, they
last two hours, and then they end. There is plenty of potential in
the use of various HFR to create vivid, realistic imagery in film,
but as with all things, the tool must be used in the proper manner to
fit the story being told. Since Gemini Man never seemed to have much
of a story to begin with, this wasn't the one to sell me on it.
-Noah
Franc
