Gemini Man

Ang Lee's Gemini Man has been a script Hollywood has been trying to make for over 20 years.  The movie is built around an aging assassin being forced to fight against a younger clone of himself that is intended to replace him.  Supposedly the reason why it took so long for this film to go before the cameras is that the technology was not there.  If the final movie is any indication, the script wasn't quite ready to go before the cameras either.

So, we get Will Smith playing the 51-year-old hitman, Henry Brogan.  He's the "best of the best" at what he does.  In the film's opening scene, Henry sets up his high-powered rifle on a hillside, takes aim, and manages to shoot and assassinate a Russian bad guy on a train right as it speeds by.  He even manages to narrowly miss a little girl who was trying to talk to the Russian moments before Henry shot him through the window of the train.  In my mind, I imagine an alternate movie where that little girl is put through years of therapy by this ordeal.  But, I digress.  Henry wants to retire from the murder game.  He meant to shoot the target in the head, but hit him in the neck instead.  He's off his game.  Henry just wants to lay low in his isolated home, and fight the nightmares that plague his sleep each night.

Not long after he calls it quits, he visits an old friend on a yacht who happens to tell him a deep, dark secret about the agency he used to work for.  Obviously, this means that Henry's friend will be dead the next time we see him, and some agents are going to start coming after Henry as well.  He kills a dozen or so wannabe assassins, then goes on the run with another agent named Danny (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), who was initially supposed to track Henry, but gains his trust over drinks before the assassination attempt takes place.  Speaking of drinks, there is a heck of a lot of drinking in this movie, to the point that it's almost a running gag.  Product placements for Coke and a variety of beers abound, as Henry stops for a drink seemingly every other scene.  This could be the first movie to inspire a drinking game built around drinking.

Back to the plot: Henry, Danny, and a comic relief sidekick who joins them on the adventure (Benedict Wong) find themselves on the run from a teeth-gnashing villain called Clay Verris (Clive Owen, giving as little enthusiasm to his performance as possible here).  Naturally, Clay and Henry have a history, and for the past few decades, the evil Clay has been the head of a top secret cloning program where they clone their best soldiers, and train the clones to be fearless super soldiers.  Naturally, one of those clones is a younger version of Henry, whom Clay has been raising as a son, and calls "Junior".  So, it's Will Smith vs. a digitally de-aged Will Smith acting as the central gimmick of what is otherwise an overly routine and uninspired spy thriller.

If you're going to build your entire movie around a special effect as Gemini Man does, you'd better do it right, and this movie does not.  It's jarring when we look at the "younger" Will Smith, who often resembles a CG Uncanny Valley version of Smith back in his Fresh Prince days.  It's something you can't take your eyes off of, and not because of how well done it is.  It looks awkward whenever Will Smith has to share the screen with "himself", and it gets even worse when the two have to fight each other, as the action is often so frantic and dimly shot, we can barely make out what's happening.  It's a lot of CG-assisted parkour, flipping around and motorcycle stunts that look about as authentic as a video game cutscene.  The clone is a personality-free killing machine, which would be kind of creepy, if Henry often didn't come across the same way.  So, we get two lifeless Will Smith performances.  I think I liked it better when movies like After Earth only gave us one.

Clearly, nothing in this movie matters.  We don't care about the characters, because they're not allowed to build real relationships, and only talk in exposition dialogue or quips and one liners that fall flat on their face.  We don't care about the plot, because aside from the whole cloning gimmick, it's completely uninspired.  And we don't care about the cloning gimmick itself, because the movie can't think of anything to do with it.  After the initial shock of seeing how terrible the de-aged Will Smith looks, we're left with a lot of banal dialogue between the two Smiths, where the older one tries to lead the younger one down a different path than taking lives.  If the movie had a shred of personality or life, this might have led to some interesting scenes.  But every time it tries to be about something, it flounders, thanks to the forced dialogue.

The only thing Gemini Man has going for it is that it's not the worst movie I've seen about cloning this year.  That "honor" still goes to the Keanu Reeves bomb, Replicas, from back in January.  Still, that doesn't excuse this gimmicky and ultimately unnecessary film from cluttering up valuable theater space.  Given how long this movie was in development, you'd think someone would bring up that the technology wasn't the problem, it was the lousy script. 

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