KUATO, IS IT ME YOU’RE LOOKING FOR?

In the years separating Total Recall from its remake, action cinema has su≠ered a severe identity crisis

The most memorable effect in 1990’s Total Recall may be also be its cheapest. Paul Verhoeven’s sci-fi blockbuster cast peak-fame Arnold Schwarzenegger as a nearf-uture everyman who may or may not also be a super-spy embroiled in a populist revolution on Mars. Dispatched to the red planet, Arnold chases a lead to a fleapit disco teeming with mutants and revolutionaries. It’s there that he comes across the movie’s most indelible invention: a prostitute anatomically distinguished by her superfluous third breast.

At the time, Total Recall was the most expensive film ever made — a lavishly realized bit of summer escapism moving deftly between hyper-violence and high camp. It’s loaded with explosions, gory rat-a-tat gunfights and plum Schwarzeneggerian one-liners (“Screw you!” he howls, running an oversized drill into someone’s gut). But that super-bosomy sex worker stands out above all, a disposable bit of sleaze that totally imprints the film. In an instant, she defines the attitudes of satire, goofball adolescent fantasy and brazen excess that Total Recall so perfectly alchemized.

There’s a new Total Recall in cinemas this weekend. Directed by Len Wiseman (infamous for spoiling the Die Hard series), bankrolled by Neal H. Mortiz’ Original Film (ironically) and shot in and around Toronto, its Us$200-million budget gives it the distinction of being the most expensive film ever made in Canada.

This one casts Colin Farrell in the Schwarzenegger role, this time caught in a revolutionary crossfire between the United Federation of Britain and the colony of “New Asia.”

Nobody goes to Mars in this Total Recall. There are no mutant rebels, nor much in the way of one-liners. The carnage has been toned down, too. Where blood splatter coloured outside the original’s popcorn fare contours, here flesh-andblood baddies are largely replaced by an army of easily dispatched robots, keeping the PG13 rating safely intact. Bloated blockbusting replaces satirizing of the same.

Yet there is a three-breasted woman, played by Toronto’s Kaitlyn Leeb. Like much in Wiseman’s redo, Leeb’s appearance feels meaningless. It’s one of several references to Verhoeven’s film that make you want to sneak out of the theatre, go home and watch the original. For all its mammary excess, it feels empty. However impossible it seems, this Total Recall manages to make a threebreasted prostitute seem groaningly, eye-rollingly serious.

It’s an attitude that’s become epidemic, glumly undermining the giddy pleasures of summer movies. Contemporary action cinema suffers from seriousness. It squirms under its own self-imposed weight like a pigeon-chested geek struggling to lift a cartoon barbell.

Most notably, Christopher Nolan’s 2005 Batman Begins shifted the emphasis away from a flamboyant rogues gallery or penguins strapped with rocket launchers. Even before Nolan’s franchise, films such as The Matrix (which borrowed heavily from Total Recall in its idea of willfully indulging in a simulated reality) and the super-spy Bourne movies (which cast Matt Damon as a dour James Bond) set a tone. Above-the-title action stars don’t smirk or crack wise anymore. They brood. Like Total Recall’s amnesiac hero, they just can’t seem to remember who they are.

Recently in The New York Times Magazine, Adam Sternbergh declared the American action film “kablooey.” He saw the genre migrating elsewhere,

Above-the-title action stars don’t smirk anymore

to foreign imports that pick up where movies like Die Hard left off. His piece was pegged on the release of the Indonesian martial arts flick, The Raid: Redemption, an Americanized actioner that’s already slated for its own American remake.

A few weeks after Sternbergh took the pulse, the oldschool action hero was revived in Lockout, a French production starring Guy Pearce as an American agent tasked with extracting the U.S. president’s daughter from a space prison. Lockout has good fun riffing on its hero’s archaic wiseassery, skirting the nudging obnoxiousness of more self-aware genre exercises. Elsewhere, filmmakers hustle on the fringes to carve out a space for these sorts of movies, sneaking around in the long shadow of the studio mainstream.

Writer/director duo Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor jolted the fading corpus of American action cinema with their playfully moronic triptych of Crank, Crank: High Voltage and Gamer, like merry prankster genre physicians playing with souped-up defibrillator paddles.

As if responding to the wash of blockbuster superhero team-ups, Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Bruce Willis and a crew of other over-the-hill icons will reassemble later this summer for The Expendables 2, a knowingly nostalgic throwback to the ‘ 80s action mold. The Expendables gets a little too close to “genre exercise” territory, its reflective, mistyeyed evocation of some bygone golden age of big-budget heroism missing the mark a bit.

But it’s not in The Expendables or Total Recall 2.0 but in the cheap thrills of the Lockouts and Cranks that old-school action has dug in his heels. Action movies haven’t disappeared. They’ve just moved underground, into the fittingly disreputable ghetto of B-movies.

And if you’re rummaging around for cinema’s contemporary equivalent of the threebreasted prostitute, it’s a good place to start looking.