Henry Brogan (Will Smith) is an aging assassin. He’s still cutting-edge lethal, but as is apparently the case with assassins in their twilight years, he’s growing a conscience.
He snipes a bad guy on a high-speed train, from two kilometers out, and notices he got distracted by the little girl who was standing near his victim. He thinks he got lucky—could have killed the girl. And this gives him pause.
Isn’t that an exciting premise? The idea’s been kicking around for 20 years; they just didn’t have the CGI wizardry available yet. Andy Serkis’s Gollum changed all that.
So is it realistic? Well ... that opening, about a confirmed kill from two kilometers away? Compensating for all the minutia snipers have to adjust for—gravity, wind, and even earth rotation—all in addition to calculating enough lead time to pinpoint a target on a high-speed train? I didn’t go to sniper school, but I’m pretty sure such a shot is ridiculously unrealistic.
So, again, are cloned super-soldiers realistic? They’ve cloned stuff! They cloned that sheep! Named her Dolly, they did. They can clone humans. Probably already done it. But can they also turn down the clone’s emotional life, as if it had a genetically accessible volume dial, which could render it 100 percent fearless?
Henry’s Story
Henry’s tired. As characters inevitably say in this kind of story, “I’m getting too old for this.” He’s looking to go back to Georgia and mellow out on his porch, maybe do a little fishing. But his Spidey, er ... Henry-sense, picks up that he’s being surveilled.He suspects the new, pretty grad student (Mary Elizabeth Winstead, actually the best thing about this movie) who’s booking fishing boats at the office shack for the local marina.
Now, while Henry’s busy getting comfortable, we learn that two decades earlier, one Clay Verris (Clive Owen), who trained Henry, also surreptitiously helped himself to some of Henry’s DNA and cloned the aforementioned Junior. Clay raised Junior as his son. Strangely, though this type of storyline involving enhanced super-soldiers always has mass production as its endgame, Junior doesn’t get mass-produced. Not in this movie.
Good Fight Scenes
Since this is a terminator-type movie—that is, detect the terminator, run away from the terminator, fight the terminator, and so on—it’s not terribly deep. It’s mindless action. But this is Ang Lee we’re talking about, one of my favorite directors, and so as shallow as the premise is, it’s quite fun.The gimmick here, much like Richard Linklater’s superb gimmick from “Boyhood,” where he went back every year, for many years, and actually filmed a young boy growing up, is that we get to see mature, white-beard-stubbled Will Smith roll around with and pummel—and be pummeled by—his computer-generated “Fresh Prince of Bel Air” era self. Which is maybe a bit less fresh.
In fact, speaking of Linklater’s “Boyhood,” the ideal way this film should have been shot would have been for Ang Lee to develop his supernormal ability of precognition and start shooting Will Smith doing all the Junior scenes in his 20s. And then shelve the project for 20 years and wait until Smith turned 51.
In addition to the CGI, “Gemini Man” was shot with a higher frame rate. (Motion picture film cameras typically shoot 24 frames per second. The higher rate is supposed to prevent that ghostly flicker you see if you avert your eyes from the screen in a darkened room and, thereby, feel more realistic.) This personally does nothing for me. Neither did the 3D in this case.
Anyway, there are two fight scenes. One involves a “Mission Impossible”-style motorcycle chase, with shooting and driving, punching and kicking and driving, and stunt riding using the motorcycle itself as an assault weapon. The bike is also deployed as a martial arts extension of the rider, as in the case of a moto-version of a spinning back kick, using the back wheel instead of the heel. Exxxxcellennnt.
All in All
We’ve been spoiled regarding CG characters ever since Gollum. One instance that matched that standard recently was the pretty little huge-eyed cyborg Alita. But you’d think that with the star power of Smith and Lee, a more scarily convincing facsimile of young Smith could have been produced.
A cloned human is created by no god, so there is no human soul. But a human body needs a soul to animate it, and nature abhors a vacuum. What kind of entity will creep in there and animate that human clone? Those are likely stories the horror genre will address in the future.
