Self/Less

Tarsem Singh's Self/Less is a B-Movie thriller that somehow was able to attract the talents of Ryan Reynolds and Ben Kingsley.  Of the two, Kingsley gets the showier role and the better deal, as he only has to appear in the first 20 minutes.  One of the big reasons why the movie doesn't work is that we're supposed to believe that both Reynolds and Kingsley are playing the same person, and it never comes across that way.  Kingsley at least seems to be having fun and hams it up a little, while Reynolds is obviously cashing a paycheck.

Yes, Self/Less is a "body switch" movie, in which one person enters the body of another.  The genre succeeds and fails solely on the performances of the two leads who are supposed to be playing the same person, and this movie fails that crucial test.  Ben Kingsley starts the movie off as a New York financial tycoon named Damian, who has amassed a great wealth in his lifetime and lives in one of those massive, gold-plated Manhattan penthouses.  What he doesn't have is the respect of his peers, or his family.  He has an adult daughter that he is estranged from who treats him like dirt, because he was never around when she was growing up.  Now Damian is less than six months away from dying of an aggressive cancer.  However, Damian has come across a controversial and top secret medical science that is experimenting with transferring a person's soul and placing it in a different, much younger body.

The mind behind this process is geneticist Professor Albright (Matthew Goode), who looks uncannily like what would happen if Clark Kent grew up to become a slimy and unethical mad scientist villain, instead of a mild mannered reporter.  He has a device in a secret underground lab that can place Damian in an entirely new, young and physically fit body.  Albright claims that the bodies that he uses as hosts are genetically engineered, but Goode plays him as a shifty James Bond villain type, so we know something is up from the start.  Damian goes through with the process, and when he wakes up, he is inside the body of Ryan Reynolds.  He is given a new identity and life, since no one is supposed to know that Damian went through the process.  For all purposes, the Damian that everyone knew is dead, and he has to start an entirely different life in his new body.

While Damian has fun in his new body wooing women, playing basketball and generally partying all hours of the day and night, he starts to have disturbing hallucinations of a completely different life that he does not recognize.  Of course, they're not hallucinations at all.  Turns out the new body he's inhabiting is not genetically engineered, but rather a person who died.  The forgotten memories of the person he's inhabiting are starting to come up to the surface, and as they come more regularly, Damian begins to suspect that Albright is not as ethical as he claims with his process.  Curious about the visions he's experiencing, Damian starts to track down information about the man whose body he's inhabiting, as well as seeking out the man's wife (Natalie Martinez) and young daughter (Jaynee-Lynn Kinchen) who frequent the visions.  Not long after he tracks down the family, then Albright sends his goons after him, trying to silence him and stop from learning anything more.

Self/Less starts out on shaky ground by not only really attempting to explain Albright's process of transferring people into a new body (it apparently involves a lot of swirling lights and cheap Sci-Fi noises), but by not really explaining Albright's motives as a villain.  He claims that he wants Damian to be kept alive, so why does he send a bunch of heavily armed henchmen with guns and flamethrowers to burn down the house of the family of the body he's inhabiting?  Also, is it such a smart idea to have goons armed with flamethrowers to be burning down cars and houses in broad daylight next to a busy road?  Wouldn't that draw some attention to his evil plan?  Regardless, the villain's motives seem to change at a drop of a hat.  Sometimes he seems to want to explain himself to the heroes, and sometimes he wants them all dead.  The movie is not really even interested in asking the obvious questions that a body-swapping procedure like this would bring up.  It simply uses the process as a cheap set up for a bunch of uninspired chase and martial art fight scenes, as Ryan Reynolds and his former family go on the run.

And like I said before, we never get the sense that Reynolds is playing the same character that Kingsley was during the first 20 minutes.  Yes, he's in a new body, but he's still supposed to be the same person.  Reynolds never has the mean-spirited edge that Kingsley brought to the early scenes, and instead plays his part of the role as a generic action hero.  It also never really goes as deep into the issue of the wife's reaction to all of this as it should.  Here is her former husband, back from the dead, only it's not her husband, he has a New York millionaire inhabiting his body.  Does she ask any questions about the procedure?  Does she ask why he picked her husband's body?  No, of course not.  When she learns the truth, she's upset for maybe about a minute, and then she never brings it up again.  The movie is too busy being an action movie to ask these kind of questions.  It would be one thing if the action here was intense or at least well done, but it's not.

This is a big surprise, since the film's director is Tarsem Singh, a filmmaker who is known for inventive visuals in movies such as The Cell or Immortals.  Even if a lot of his films haven't exactly been great, he's always brought some stunning effects and effective set pieces to distract us.  Here, he brings us nothing.  The movie actually has the look of an uninspired made for TV movie.  You have to wonder what drew him to this project, as it provides no opportunities for any of his trademark visuals.  You actually have to wonder why drew anyone to this, really.  The script is lame, using shortcuts in place of character development.  There's no memorable dialogue or scenes that stand out.  The movie could have just as easily been pasted together from a few Sci-Fi thrillers and the Bourne movies, and it probably was.

Self/Less is one of those movies that seems destined to be forgotten immediately.  It doesn't have anything to truly recommend it.  It sort of plays out, and you move on with your life, never thinking about it again.  When you think of how many scripts the studio passed over for this that were probably much more original or well thought out than this, it paints an even bleaker picture.  Nobody needed this movie, and there was no need to make it.

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