His own WORST ENEMY
Will Smith’s prolific hitman faces a deadly threat from his younger self in a cloning thriller that veers between compelling and corny
AS A premise for a thriller, cloning is nothing new. Gregory Peck was at it more than 40 years ago in The Boys From Brazil.
But biotechnology has moved on a bit since then. Indeed, Dolly the Sheep gets a namecheck in Gemini Man, which surely is a first: placid ewes from Scotland, even the only world-famous one, don’t normally pop up in any form in Will Smith movies.
In many other ways, there is nothing remarkable about this film. Relentlessly throbbing music and unyieldingly silly dialogue, in the service of a far-fetched plot, make it, in most respects, a standard Hollywood thriller.
When a man says to a woman, ‘It’s not gun time, it’s coffee time,’ you might have to think back to old Maxwell House commercials for a cheesier line.
But let me give credit where it is due. Gemini Man revolves around the idea that the world’s greatest hitman, Henry Brogan, has been cloned. When his paymasters in a shady US government agency called Gemini decide to have him popped, the assassin tasked with the job is his own younger self.
Without recent advances in cinematic technology, such a story would be nighon impossible to pull off. As it is, director Ang Lee is able to use a perfect digital recreation of the young Will Smith, and some of the old Brogan vs young Brogan scenes are duly impressive. There are cracking fight and chase sequences, too.
A little less advisedly, Lee also designed this film to be shown in 3D high-frame format.
Most films are projected at 24 frames per second; Gemini Man comes at us at 120 frames per second, delivering pin-sharp, ‘hyperreal’ images.
Which means that if only Smith weren’t 25ft high, you could quite easily believe that he was hurtling out of the screen and up the aisle of your local multiplex, as if hell-bent for the gents, or possibly the pick ’n’ mix stand.
Now, I wouldn’t want to sound like one of those reactionaries who thought the talkies would never catch on, but 3D isn’t my favourite way to see a movie, especially not in harness with a high-frame rate. Too much visual realism, paradoxically, can get in the way of a film’s credibility.
Lee attempted the same thing with his last picture, Billy Lynn’s Long Half-time Walk (2016), which was received with indifference at best. So hats off to him, in a way, for trying again.
And, of course, he’s a very accomplished director (Sense And Sensibility, Brokeback Mountain, Life Of Pi), to whom we should always pay attention. Even so, I hope it’s not the future.
BUT AFTER all that, what of the actual story? It starts with Brogan executing one of those hits that only exist in the movies, judging to perfection a high-calibre rifle shot from a distant hilltop through the window of a speeding train.
The train happens to be zooming at more than 150mph through the Belgian countryside. That’s why it’s such a tricky manoeuvre. If it were some of our own public transport services, obviously he’d have time to jog gently down from his hilltop, clamber on board, find his victim and administer some slow poison.
Anyway, let’s just say that through no fault of his, the fellow in his crosshairs is not as deserving of a bullet as Brogan thinks he is, which is how our muscular hero comes to realise that his time as the world’s greatest hitman, with 72 clean kills to his name, is probably up.
And that doesn’t mean a stressfree retirement catching fish; it means sleeping with them. In short, Brogan knows too much.
But of course there’s only one man resourceful enough to terminate Brogan, and that’s Brogan, the junior version.
He has been raised, to carry out just such a job, by the sinister boss of Gemini, played by Clive Owen. Oddly enough, Owen played precisely the same type of character in his last
film, The Informer. If it were easier to get may head round, I’d say he, too, had been cloned. By now, according to the timehonoured action-movie formula that we all know so well, Brogan has enlisted the help of an attractive protegee (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), with whom there appears to be a sexual frisson; and a fiercely loyal, slightly dishevelled, faintly comical colleague from his time in special forces (Benedict Wong), with whom there’s no sexual frisson, just the eternal bond that comes from being holed up together, years before, in ‘a bunker in Mogadishu’.
The same formula also dictates that the action flits around the planet, so for the flimsiest of reasons (probably known only to the locations manager, but perhaps also to writers Darren Lemke, Billy Ray and David Benioff) we are whisked from the marshes of Georgia in the American South to the rooftops of Cartagena in Colombia to the catacombs of Budapest in Hungary.
In other words, Gemini Man is a corny, predictable thriller like any other, except insofar as it is a corny, predictable thriller like no other.
THE week’s other major release is Abominable, with an all-important capital A.
There are abominable things about this DreamWorks animation, however, not least that phenomenon known as ‘cultural appropriation’.
On the whole, I’m pretty relaxed about US animators turning the whole world into an annexe of California, but it’s notably crass in this film set largely in Shanghai to have characters who have clearly been drawn to look Chinese, but not ‘too’ Chinese.
They are led by Yi, a teenage girl who befriends a young yeti that has escaped from captivity and, with two friends, sets out to repatriate him in the Himalayas.
Can they elude a very villainous English tycoon (voiced by Eddie Izzard), who wants their furry friend, whom they have named Everest, for his collection?
I wish I could say it was fun finding out.