NO THANKS FOR THE MEMORIES
REMINISCENCE AIMS FOR FUTURISTIC NOIR, BUT ENDS UP WITH A LOT OF FLASH AND NO SUBSTANCE
Reminiscence
Cast: Hugh Jackman, Rebecca Ferguson Director: Lisa Joy Duration: 1 h 56 m Available: In theatres
They should have called this movie Near Blunder. Not only does it describe the almost-terrible nature of the production, but it’s an anagram of Blade Runner. And Reminiscence is what you’d get if you took all the emotional and design elements of the 1982 sci-fi classic and gave them a good shake. It’s like someone remembered all the right ingredients for a good story, but forgot how to tell it.
Hugh Jackman stars as Nick Bannister, a former soldier now operating a kind of memory bank in what’s left of Miami after climate change has left half the city underwater. Pay for his services, and he’ll hook you up to a machine that can let you recall a memory in perfect detail.
People use this device to remember happier times, but it can also be employed by the DA’S office (where Nick freelances) as a deposition tool. You may be able to lie under oath, but memories are never wrong. (Actually, science shows that memories are often incorrect, but that’s a notion for which writer-director Lisa Joy has no time.)
In true noir fashion, Nick’s life takes a romantic swerve when a gorgeous dame named Mae (Rebecca Ferguson) walks in, looking to recall where she left her keys earlier in the day. Nick helps her recover them, and then the two of them fall in love.
And boy, does he fall. There are easily 20 minutes amid the film’s nearly two hours featuring close-ups of Jackman looking romantically dumbstruck. It’s a little embarrassing. Even his business partner is reduced to rolling her eyes at him.
But lovestruck gazes turn to blank befuddlement when Mae up and vanishes, seemingly of her own accord but without saying a word to Nick. He starts replaying the memories of their relationship, looking for any clue as to why she left. And then, in the midst of interrogating a small-time crook involved in the drug trade, he sees her again in the man’s memories. The criminal case suddenly gets personal.
I was in awe of the production design that turned Miami into a kind of neo-venice, and I liked the notion that rising temperatures mean the entire city goes to bed when the sun comes up, and does all its living in the cooler hours of darkness.
But I kept getting distracted by all the Blade Runner flotsam — endless voice-over narration, old songs (1937’s Where or When), neon lighting, random antique cars, much swilling of whiskey, a foot chase through what looks like Chinatown, a rooftop gunfight atop a crumbling building, retro fashions, and on and on. Even the movie’s poster, a jumble of faces backed by red and green lighting, is the spitting image of the one for Blade Runner 2049.
So between what I’m going to politely refer to as extreme homage, and the film’s reluctance to engage with its memory-recollection machine as anything more than a fancy narrative flashback device, Reminiscence is all flash and no substance, doing little to earn the emotional catharsis it so desperately wants. I wouldn’t go so far as to call the results horrible, but for a movie like this my adjective of choice is perhaps even worse. It’s forgettable. ∏∏