Too much Will Smith fighting Will Smith
In “Gemini Man,” there are two Will Smiths, and one is trying to kill the other. To make things potentially more interesting, one is middleaged and one is in his early 20s. So, automatically, there are possibilities here — a movie about a psyche at war with itself or perhaps a movie about the contrasts between youth and middle age.
But no. What we get here is the basic situation: Two Will Smiths, one trying to kill the other. Nothing fancy, just that.
Technologically, “Gemini Man” is borderline miraculous. We might think we’re watching two Smiths, one regular and one deaged. In fact, the younger (cloned) Smith doesn’t really exist, except as a 100 percent digital creation that’s just dropped into the frame. That’s remarkable, but as with everything that’s technologically remarkable, you can only say “wow” for five minutes. Then you get used to it, and you’re back to watching a particular story with a particular actor.
A small part of the film’s problem is Smith himself, nothing he does, just something intrinsic to him as a screen actor: We don’t need two of him. That’s a flip way of saying something a little deeper, that this is not an actor with a riddle to his personality. Imagine, for example, two Robert Redfords, two George Clooneys or two Sidney Poitiers. Just going in, such a story would have moral implications.
For that matter, imagine two Meg Ryans. Imagine two Diane Keatons. Or the Jessica Chas
tain of today starring opposite a CGI version of herself at 70. You can almost write the scenes. You can imagine the possibilities for conflict and revelation.
With Smith, it doesn’t get much deeper than this: Older Smith sympathizes with Younger Smith and doesn’t want to kill him. Younger Smith is a killing machine, but he’s conflicted. Older Smith is smarter, but Younger Smith can beat Older Smith to a pulp. Fine. You know what? I wouldn’t want to get into a fistfight with my younger self, either. I think he’d win. But I don’t need to go to a movie for such a startling insight.
And this is where the problem with Smith overlaps with the problem of “Gemini Man.” You can fault Smith for not deepening the material, but let’s be fair. Within his sphere, Smith is an entirely engaging actor, and he gets no help from the screenplay, which doesn’t capitalize on the central gimmick’s possibilities. Mostly, the presence of two Smiths just gives us scenes of them shooting at each other, but you know they’ll miss; or fighting each other, but you know that no one will get seriously hurt.
Incidentally, this is an Ang Lee film, though, beyond the firstrate production values, you wouldn’t know it. Lee seems happy that he has embraced technology, but what’s the point if the technology is in the service of an empty exercise? He has made one movie like this and doesn’t need to make another.
Actually, the one place where Lee’s touch can be felt is in the casting. He puts the talented and underused Mary Elizabeth Winstead as the second lead, doesn’t glamour her up and, with the complicity of the screenwriters, doesn’t devise some obligatory romance. He makes Clive Owen the nervous, driven villain of the piece, who dreams of a cloned army. (Maybe he saw “Star Wars.”) And he casts an interesting, rumpled character actor, Benedict Wong, as our hero’s war buddy. Now, if only these actors were given something worth saying to each other.
Curiously, before the clone aspect kicks in, “Gemini Man” is humming along as a brisk, competent action movie. Henry (Smith) works for the government as a master assassin, killing only bad guys. And then one day, he shoots a guy in the neck, not the head, and he realizes he’s losing a step. Next time, he might miss altogether. Next time, he might kill the wrong person. So he announces his retirement and settles down to live in the kind of place that James Bond retreats to between assignments, As in, nobody’s there. That’s when he finds out that the government has been using him, that his last supposed bad guy/victim was actually a good guy and a victim of a diabolical American plot.
Once he knows that, well, he knows too much. And so ...
Had “Gemini Man” continued on that line, Lee might have had something. At least he would have something more diverting than two hours of watching Will Smith chasing himself.