Stuck in a loop in sci-fi thriller “Infinite”
There’s an early scene in “Infinite,” Antoine Fuqua’s sci-fi thriller on Paramount+, that feels like an outtake from a social-issue drama. Mark Wahlberg’s Evan Mccauley attends a job interview at a restaurant, where the slimy proprietor grills him about his past struggles with mental health before dismissing him rudely. “Who’s going to hire a diagnosed schizophrenic with a history of violence?” a dejected Evan wonders in voice-over as he walks back home. I was disarmed by the humansize pathos of this scene: Evan’s got bills to pay and pills to buy, same as us all.
But “Infinite” is a movie about superheroes, which means that the stakes have to become, at minimum, planet-size. As it turns out, Evan isn’t delusional: He’s special. He’s one of a select group of souls, called “the Infinite,” who are born (and reborn) with the ability to remember all their skills and experiences from past lives. Among this lot are bad guys who want to blow up the world and good guys who want to save it. (That both factions employ similar methods — crashing souped-up cars through city streets with nary a care for collateral damage — goes unaddressed, though I wouldn’t be surprised if a sequel devoted itself to handwringing about the greater good.)
Chiwetel Ejiofor plays the snarling alpha villain, Bathurst, who’s so sick of rinsing and repeating his existence that he’s invented a device — elegantly named “the Egg” — to raze all of life. Evan stopped him in a previous go-round and must do so again, but first he needs to unclog centuries of memories and superpowers. And so Nora (Sophie Cookson), one of the good gals, whisks Evan away to a mystical Wakanda-like destination, home to a Xavier Institute–like research center, where he undergoes a Batman–like training routine to save humanity from a Thanoslike villain’s Infinity Stone–like totem.
There’s a joke to be made here about the oppressive déjà vu of a movie about endless reincarnations, but I’d feel like a broken record for making it. To demand originality from these algorithmic franchise-starters is to miss the point. But the problem with Antoine Fuqua’s spin on the formula is that it’s mostly formula and hardly any spin. It’s as if Fuqua and his writers (Ian Shorr and Todd Stein) found the source code to the genre and 3-D printed it without any of the primal thrills that make such blockbusters watchable: intricate, ever-expanding world-building; giant objects whizzing into each other with satisfying booms; charismatic characters defying death with panache.
Instead, “Infinite” muddles around with some wishy-washy Eastern philosophy, and has mostly charmless actors (with the exception of Ejiofor, magnetic against the odds) duel and drive while mouthing exposition that lacks even a wisp of subtext. Evan and his ilk are called the “believers,” Bathurst’s crew are the “nihilists,” and Jason Mantzoukas plays a tech genius who controls his fancy gadgets with pronouncements like “Open weapons room door!”
What’s interesting about all this unabashed literalness is how nakedly it makes the case for the film’s own perpetuation. “Infinite” ends with a poppsych spiel about how every new story is a chance at hope and possibility. Who can blame Bathurst for being tired of reliving the same stuff over and over again? Yet while he wants to burn the world down, I’m still holding out hope for the movies.