Summary:
An aging hitman faces off against a younger clone of himself.
My Thoughts:
Whenever a large budget movie fails horribly I generally go out of my way to see it. I’m the kind of viewer that finds a lot of humor in watching the bigger bumbles in cinema (like Tom Hooper’s “Cats”- I suppose it’s a year for former Best Directors to go astray), because usually when movies are misguided enough to earn reviews as bad as this one from critics and audiences alike (currently 26% on Rotten Tomatoes, 38% on Metacritic, and 5.7 on IMDb), they’re filled with all sorts of flaws like hokey acting, ridiculous action, hilarious dialogue and incomprehensible plotting. My roommates and I all saw the trailer for this film a while back and thought it looked rather awful and actively anticipated watching this together; so on a cold rainy day in January we sat down and began our journey with Will Smith (“Bright”) and junior Will Smith (no, not Jaden). To all of our great disappointments, we found the film was not that funny, but instead was a mind-numbingly boring rehash of action clichés mixed with a half-baked sci-fi plot starring a lifeless aging actor who’s just trying to stay relevant (see my review for “Bad Boys for Life” whenever I end up seeing that inevitable train wreck).
“I’m not you old man… I’m not you!”
Henry (Smith) is an aging hitman who is looking to get out of the business, but his boss Clay (Clive Owen, “King Arthur (2004)”) won’t let him retire, and instead tries to kill him (yawn). Henry goes on the run with his new girlfriend Danny (Mary Elizabeth Winstead, “Death Proof”) whom has a secret about her identity. Soon, Clay sends a clone of Henry after him; the clone is creatively named Junior.
So, this film was billed as an action movie, but, if I remember right, there are less than a total of five action sequences, and almost all of those sequences are less than five minutes long (I watched this movie yesterday and already a fair portion of it has vanished from my brain- there’s absolutely nothing memorable about this film). Now, I have no problem when ‘action’ movies are more focused on the characters and an examination of consequences after the trigger is pulled, but the characters have to be interesting and Henry is the most boring, cliché character I’ve seen in action movie history. To make matters worse, the dialogue is horrible, and not to the point that it’s laughable; it’s just a bunch of boing, flat, uninteresting drivel that moves us mindlessly from one scene to the next. Will Smith plays two characters. The older Smith delivers all of his dialogue with less enthusiasm he showed in “After Earth”, and in that movie his character was supposed to be completely devoid of all emotion. Younger Smith seems like he’s doing a Jaden Smith impression, and it’s awkward. Winstead really tries to make the scenes work, but as she’s acting against a corpse for half the film and it just doesn’t work. Benedict Wong (“Annihilation”) is in this movie for a minute, and he’s pretty good. Clive Owen seems to be settling into a rut of ‘generic brooding bad guy’ and I hope he gets out of it.
Another weird thing about this film was that it was shot in sixty frames per second; the usual frame rate for film is twenty four (or 23. 98). Shooting in a faster frame rate eliminates some of naturally occurring motion blur between frames, and that gives the overall product a feeling of watching a soap opera. To make matters worse, during the dialogue Lee positions a lot of his cameras as if he’s interviewing his characters from across a table; so it looks like every line is just being read off a teleprompter just over the camera. There’s also a lot of digital deaging done in this film so that Smith can act against himself, and it’s much more noticeable in higher frame rate (in fact all of the CGI is more noticeable). The action looks very jarring too; with the sped up frame rate you can just tell whenever anyone softens a blow, and every rehearsed action feels obvious. There is one really funny action scene where Junior fights elder Smith with a dirt bike, but that’s’ the only part of this film I enjoyed.
Verdict:
Skip this film. It’s not even slightly good. I had hoped for something to laugh at, but instead I found myself struggling to stay awake.
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