Sunday, October 13, 2019

Review: Gemini Man


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