BEFORE: Just 50 films left to go in this year (but 112 days to watch them), it's hard to believe but Movie Year 12 is 5/6 over, which is something like 83%. I think we can all agree that this has been the weirdest collection of films ever assembled, and I'm not even up to the part with vampires, witches, werewolves and zombies yet. Perhaps this is appropriate for 2020, a year with an undeniable level of anxiety over what's coming next - will it be election disasters or more police shootings? Murder hornets or plague squirrels? Wildfires or tropical storms? What's next on my list, "Breakfast of Champions" or "Hot Rod"? "The Family Man" or "River's Edge"? It's all solid work, and even a bad film represents progress in some way - at the very least, I never have to wonder about that one again, and watching it frees up a spot on my list for something else. Life is kind of like a box of chocolates, but sometimes it's a box where I don't like any of the filling flavors - I wish I could just take a bite of each one and leave the rest of the chocolate in the box. But that's bad form, so I always press on, and finish the movie, even if it's not pleasing me.
Will Smith carries over from "Bad Boys for Life".
THE PLOT: An over-the-hill hitman faces off against a younger clone of himself.
AFTER: I saw the trailer for this film several times last year, back in the before times when you could go to a movie theater in NYC. Of course the trailer spoiled the single most important plot point of this film - why? I guess because it's the only thing that really sets this one apart from all other action movies, so at least giving this away might have convinced a few more people to then come out and see it. To be fair, the poster also gives it away, and the title kind of does, too - and NOT giving this point away in the trailer would probably have resulted in a very boring trailer. In case you don't already know, and it's barely even close to a spoiler at this point, Will Smith's character will be facing off against his own clone in this action film.
The industry has been slowly working up to stuff like this, in some of the Marvel movies they used new technology to "de-age" older actors like Kurt Russell, Michael Douglas and Laurence Fishburne for prominent flashback scenes. Also, they used something similar for the younger scenes with De Niro's character in "The Irishman". Meanwhile, the "Star Wars" films used similar techniques in "Rogue One" to generate realistic CGI younger versions of characters played by Carrie Fisher and the late Peter Cushing. The darker parts of the web are also using "deepfake" technology to give you an idea what it might have looked like if actresses like Marilyn Monroe had made x-rated films, and if that's your kink, then I guess it's OK, but it's also sort of illegal and very disrespectful. Nevertheless, this is where we find ourselves.
There were other ways of accomplishing this effect, I suppose - two films I watched this year with Glenn Close ("Father Figures" and "The Wife") cast her own daughter, Annie Starke, to play a younger version of the same character in flashback scenes. But those weren't action films with big budgets, so if you've got the money, then filming a stand-in and putting Will Smith's face on him with effects seems to be the most efficient way to go. I thought maybe they saved money by filming Will Smith twice and only paying him once, like the recent movie "American Pickle" did with Seth Rogen playing two characters. But no, since there were several fight scenes here it made sense to have two actors engaged in hand-to-hand combat, and then used the CGI effects to make one look like "Junior, a young clone of Will Smith's character, Henry Brogan. Perhaps they considered casting Jaden Smith, but I wonder if he was unavailable.
(I wonder if there was a temptation here to drop in a bunch of "Fresh Prince of Bel Air" references - Brogan at one point mentions growing up near Philadelphia, it might have been funny to have Junior act a bit like early 1990's Will Smith, just have him dribbling a basketball or doing a bit of rapping, something like that. But I suppose that would have been really cheap humor.)
The real Brogan is a hit-man with 72 successful kills - thankfully, those were all bad people, right? And the world is a much safer place without them, that is if you don't count all the assassinations that it took to remove them. Killing people to make the world safer seems kind of misguided, or at least very ironic, am I right? But after somehow shooting a terrorist target on a moving train from two miles away, he suddenly decides to retire. Hey, he wants to go out on top, I guess - but what are the odds that the Agency is going to let him walk away, knowing what he knows. Sure enough, the agency keeps an eye on him, and when he learns too much, they send a squad to eliminate him and the agent assigned to watch him.
When that fails, the agency turns to a private military unit named Gemini, and the agent they send to take Brogan out seems very familiar - he's got the same training, the same moves, but he's younger, stronger and faster. And he's been trained his whole life to be just like Brogan, only better at following orders without questioning them. Here I'm reminded of "The Boys from Brazil", which I watched back in April, when a bunch of Nazi scientists thought they could create a bunch of Hitler clones, if they just nurtured them the same way and subjected them to the same life experiences. The intent here was apparently to create a bunch of expendable clone soldiers, and that sort of also links back to "Star Wars", with the same questions about whether clones have individual rights or free will, or if being just copies of the original precludes that. Well, as a society we may have to find answers for this question at some point.
If it feels like it takes Brogan too long to figure out the plan, well, that may be because the audience was tipped off long ago, either by the trailer or the title or the poster. And surprisingly this film is not set in some far future year, the storyline is NOW, but that means that the clone was born (hatched?) in the late 1990's or early 2000's. This kind of fits technology's timeline, they cloned a sheep in 1996 and a human embryo in 1998, though that embryo was destroyed - as far as we know, anyway. This film's been in development almost as long as human cloning, just waiting for special effects technology to become advanced enough to make it - and finally it got released in 2019, just a year after science first successfully cloned primates, a pair of macaques. Meanwhile there's a long list of actors who were attached to this film at various times - Clint Eastwood, Harrison Ford, Nicolas Cage, De Niro, Pacino, Mel Gibson, Kevin Costner, Brad Pitt, Denzel Washington, Tom Cruise, Keanu Reeves, Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Gerard Butler, Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Jason Statham, and most recently, Idris Elba, Dwayne Johnson and Michael B. Jordan. Sometimes it takes longer to create, develop and produce a film than it does to raise a child - I don't know if I have that kind of patience for either endeavor.
I found the action scenes to be believable, though - outside of a man fighting his own clone, of course. And it's rare to see such a perfect melding of story with special effects that have only recently been perfected - the last good example might have been something like "Avatar", which heralded the start of the motion-capture trend. I guess this film didn't do the box office that was expected of it, but still, it made some money, it wasn't a total bomb. Critically it apparently didn't fare very well either, but I didn't have too many problems with it - certainly not as many Nitpick Points as I had with "Bad Boys for Life". And if you watch both films back-to-back like I did, you may notice that the two films sort of riffed off the same theme, at least to a certain degree.
Also starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead (last seen in "A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III"), Clive Owen (last seen in "Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets"), Benedict Wong (last heard in "Lady and the Tramp"), Ralph Brown (last seen in "The Crying Game"), Linda Emond (last seen in "Jenny's Wedding"), Douglas Hodge (last seen in "The Report"), Ilia Volok (last seen in "Pawn Sacrifice"), E.J. Bonilla (last seen in "The Kitchen"), Bjorn Freiberg, Justin James Boykin, David Shae (also carrying over from "Bad Boys for Life"), Theodora Miranne, Diego Adonye, Lilla Banak, Igor Szasz,
RATING: 7 out of 10 tracking devices
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