Total Recall (2012)

When I first heard that there would be a remake of Total Recall (1990), I was a little upset.  It might not be the most subtle movie (hint: Arnold), but it is a pretty awesome and ridiculous (hint: three-breasted lady) piece of action/sci-fi.  Why mess with a classic?  But then I thought it over.  This is a Philip K. Dick short story, so you could redo this film as a paranoid science fiction nightmare, like something Cronenberg would make.  Or you could play up the idea of someone not knowing their identity; it could be like The Bourne Identity, only in the future!  The only wrong way to remake Total Recall would be to try and out-action an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie.

Hmm...that trailer makes it look like they made the wrong choice.

By the end of the 21st century, the Earth has been reduced to a wasteland, following large-scale chemical warfare.  Only England and Australia remain inhabitable, although they are a tad overcrowded.  The teeming masses of Australia commute to England to work low-end jobs, while native English get the higher paying leadership positions.  Naturally, that leads to some complaints from the Australian servant class, and some domestic terrorism/freedom fighting has broken out.  Times are tense, but I know what you are wondering.  How can people commute across the globe on a regular basis?  If you guessed via a tunnel bored through the center of the planet, you defied logic and guessed right!  Douglas Quaid (Colin Farrell) is one of these menial Australian laborers.  While he has a home, a gorgeous wife, Lori (Kate Beckinsale), and a job, he is unsatisfied.  He has recurring dreams of another woman, with them on the run together from the government.

He's married to Beckinsale, but dreams of Biel.  Quaid is an ungrateful bastard.

Quaid keeps hearing about a company called Rekall.  It's a place where they implant fake memories that seem totally real, but aren't.  Essentially, it's a way for a boring person to remember an exciting life that they never had the opportunity/balls to actually experience.  Quaid decides to give it a try, and opts for the "secret agent" special.  But that's when things get bad, very fast.  Quaid already had his memories tampered with!  Now he's on the run from the police for something he doesn't understand, his wife is trying to kill him, and it appears that dream girl is actually a real person?!?  Is this all in Quaid's head, or is it really happening?

I vote real.  My imagination wouldn't come up with that dumb hairstyle.

The acting in Total Recall (2012) is pretty mediocre.  Nobody is fantastic, but nobody hams it up, either (which is probably an upgrade from the original film).  In the lead role, Colin Farrell looked suitably confused and he was convincing in his action scenes.  This role doesn't play to his strengths (thick brogue and empathetic eyebrows), but he plays a generic hero well enough.  Kate Beckinsale took on the role of the primary villain, which is a change of pace for her.  She doesn't actually seem evil, so much as she is paramilitary with crazy eyes.

Exhibit A

More than anything else, Beckinsale was cast to look hot and perform action stunts, which she handles easily.  Her role isn't very deep, but she does run around a lot to distract you from that fact.  Jessica Biel plays the part of the "good girl," which for all intents and purposes has her running for her life whenever she's onscreen.  I keep wanting Biel to show off some acting talent, but she can't seem to get past "mild alarm" in this role.

ACTING!

Bryan Cranston once again plays an authority figure in a film, and once again underwhelms when he is given generic characters.  The man can obviously act, but his movie roles don't show it.  This is the first time I have seen Bokeem Woodbine in a role that wasn't obviously sinister; he was fine playing a character part, but I think he's got enough charisma to carry a more complex role in a big movie.  Bill Nighy makes an all-too-brief appearance, probably due to his history with the director.  I love Nighy, but he is awfully boring when he plays seemingly normal people, and that's what he was here.  Rounding out the noteworthy cast, John Cho played the owner/operator of Rekall, which is a surprisingly minor role that didn't really require a recognizable actor.  Oh, and in case you were wondering, they did bring back the prostitute character with three breasts.  She's played by Kaitlyn Leeb, and the extra breast appears to be fake.  Maybe.

This is only director Len Wiseman's fourth effort behind the camera (and his first since 2007), but it's hard to tell.  Wiseman (best known for the Underworld series) slips effortlessly back into glossy action movie-mode with Total Recall (2012).  There is a metric crap-ton of action in this movie, and it all looks great.

Although it sometimes seems like an excuse to check out his wife's butt

Wiseman is not known for his storytelling skills, though, and that shows.  Total Recall (2012) is effectively one long chase scene.  The smarter elements in the plot --- the mind games and the interesting science fiction aspects --- are lost among the countless shootouts and explosions.  When he slows down to play up some of the supposedly less exciting elements, they're pretty cool, but sadly underused.

A hand-video-phone?  That's awesome!

Wiseman is also not much of an actor's director, which can be seen by the fact that his entire cast is one-dimensional.  I can't blame him for the script, but any character development --- at all --- would have been appreciated.  Story logic would have helped out a bit, too.  I couldn't have been the only person who realized that Kate Beckinsale's character is a covert agent out to capture one man, and yet she destroys more buildings and cannon fodder characters than the entire cast of Terminator 3.  That was not terribly covert.

...but she apparently enjoyed every minute of it

Total Recall (2012) is definitely a well-produced film, and it is undoubtedly full of action.  None of that means anything if the characters suck, though.  Well, I suppose that's not entirely true; if the action is ridiculous enough, it can balance out terrible characters, but that's not the case here.  Let's take one of the many chase scenes as a for instance:

Okay, this is a little reminiscent of Minority Report, but looks exciting enough.  When you look back on the film, though, this scene just blends in with dozens more that feel just like it.  However, ten seconds of Quaid at Rekall plant a lasting image in your mind.

Planting courtesy of Rekall

That is the most frustrating aspect of Total Recall (2012) --- it has some very cool sci-fi ideas and moments, but exclusively emphasizes the dumb action movie parts. As far as dumb action movies go, Total Recall is decently made.  It's nothing special, but it moves almost fast enough to keep the audience from noticing plot holes.  It's not very original, though, even for a remake.  Generic action sequences give way to homages to Minority Report, Blade Runner, and the 1990 original, but none of them are particularly clever or fun (except for tri-breast, which still makes me laugh every time). 

Cue fight scene 27

It was an incredibly poor choice to try an out-do the action in a remake of a film starring THE action star of the last 30 years, but the filmmakers didn't fail.  They were just adequate and bland.  And when you're being compared to something that was --- whatever your take on it --- unique, being boring looks even worse by comparison.  I thought about knocking this movie down a few notches for falling short of the original, but it's really a decent mindless action movie.  It should have been more, but it's perfectly mediocre for what it is.

Underworld: Awakening

Here we go.  As tween/desperate adult audiences everywhere prepare for the final episode of the Twilight Saga, somebody somewhere decided to remind horror/action fans that there were movies getting vampires wrong as far back as 2003.  Underworld: Awakening is the fourth entry in the Underworld series and is the sequel to the second film (2006's Underworld: Evolution), because making a sequel to the third movie would have been silly.  I'm not going to argue that there is absolutely no reason to make this movie --- I find the "Kate Beckinsale in tight, shiny leather" argument particularly compelling --- but did we really need another movie where vampires shoot guns at werewolves?

Okay, that trailer actually looks halfway decent.  The basic premise of the series (vampires vs. lichens lycans) has been upended, and now both classes are being hunted by the deadliest game of all: man.  There's some promise there.  What I hated about the original Underworld was how completely de-powered  the vampires felt next to the werewolves; making the enemy human changes that power dynamic.  Maybe vampires are more powerful, but there are just so many humans, using so much technology, that the Underworldians will have to change their MO.  That sounds worth checking out, right?

Underworld: Awakening begins with Selene (Kate Beckinsale), the vampire shoot-'em-up expert, and Michael (Scott Speedman), her vampire/werewolf (Vampwolf?  Werepire?) boyfriend, on the run, after the events of Underworld: Evolution.  Boom boom boom, bang bang bang, and Selene (and presumably Michael) has been captured by the human military.  The next thing you know, Selene has been cryogenically frozen and the rest of the movie is the camera slowly zooming in on her ice-block-face.

And by "rest of the movie," I of course mean "title sequence," because Selene breaks free of her icy cage and runs for her life.  She quickly learns that she has been frozen in some sort of science lab for twelve years and that the world is very different following the same trend it was when she was captured.  The humans have concentrated their efforts and have wiped werewolves off the face of the planet, and are pretty close to doing the same to vampires. 

Tip for wiping out vampires: start with the ones who have their own movies

But what set Selene free?  And what happened to Michael?  Well, her escape wasn't entirely her own doing; someone dubbed Subject 2 by the lab scientists also broke out that night.  Who or what is Subject 2?  Why do the scientists want it so badly?  The plot tries to focus on these points until enough time has passed for the film to return to its roots.  Remember the whole "Lycans are exinct" thing?  It turns out that was greatly exaggerated.

The acting in Underworld: Awakening isn't exactly great, but it's certainly good enough for a movie about vampires with guns.  Kate Beckinsale is once again very stoic in the lead, although the script makes her seem a lot stupider this time around.  Let's be honest --- the hardest part of playing Selene is looking good in her outfits, and Beckinsale still pulls it off.  Thankfully, that isn't something that is crassly exploited by the filmmakers to draw attention away from the story.

I prefer the phrase "remorselessly objectified"

Stephen Rea played the doctor heading the research on frozen vampires.  Rea's a fine actor, but he is a one-note villain here.  Michael Ealy was decent as the rogue cop who somehow comes to the conclusion that being lied to by his superiors means that he should help vampires.  I'm not saying that he's wrong, but it is a little weird at how little it takes to convince him.  Charles Dance picks up the thematic baton as the elder vampire who just can't agree with Selene on anything.  I'm not saying that his character is irrational, but every single Underworld has had a stuffy old vampire who causes unnecessary conflicts, and I'm bored with it.  Theo James played the flip side of that coin as the young vamp that supports Selene.  Kris Holden-Ried was the primary werewolf threat and was supposed to be rather intimidating, but I just couldn't get over how much he reminded me of Chris Martin from Coldplay. 

"IT WAS ALL YELLOW!"

That, of course, led me to making several Coldplay lyric references whenever he was onscreen, which accidentally turned out to be one of the highlights of the film for me.  Rounding out the cast is India Eisley, who got to be a girl of mystery.  She was okay, I guess, but her part required her to snivel and cower a lot, which got a little annoying.  None of the actors were particularly impressive or distractingly bad, which is almost an accomplishment when you are the third sequel in a series.

This movie was directed by Swedish filmmakers Måns Mårlind and Björn Stein.  It's okay if you haven't heard of them, because this is only their second English-language film, and the other was a box office dud.  The most notable choice Mårlind and Stein made was to play Underworld: Awakening completely straight.  This series has always taken itself very seriously, but there were usually a few moments where the characters reveled in their abilities or each other.  That doesn't happen here.  The story (ridiculous as it is) is told plainly, the backstory from the other movies is explained crisply, and there are action scenes every few minutes. 

"Hi, we're cannon fodder for Scene 43"

The action (for the most part) looks pretty good.  Sure, the Lycan transformations are hit and miss, but that has been an ongoing problem for this series; why fix it for the fourth movie?  More importantly, Beckinsale still looks good doing wire stunts.  There just aren't any great moments.  So it's a serviceable action movie with a science fiction/horror vibe, right?  Actually, no.  It's a mediocre action movie with a sexy leather-clad lady and pretty terrible sci-fi script.  The screenplay credit is split between four people (including J. Michael Straczynski and Underworld co-creator Len Wiseman), so it's pretty clear that the story had a few overhauls.  And it shows.  Do you like plot twists?  Do you like them better if the "twist" isn't surprising in the least?  Well, that's what you get with Underworld: Awakening.  Mårlind and Stein did an okay job with what was given to them --- I seriously doubt that the relatively unknown Swedish duo was given much leeway with their first big budget movie --- but what they had was a sorry excuse to make a quick buck off of a franchise that had already had one too many sequels.

Above: every Underworld action scene, ever

The biggest problem I had with Underworld: Awakening was how dull it was. This should have been an interesting take on Underworld's already unique angle on vampires.  But it isn't.  The humans never stand a chance against Selene and her friends and it is incomprehensible that they were ever a threat.  But then the not-at-all surprising reveal of werewolves as the primary antagonists happens, and we're right back at the beginning of the series.  The only difference is that this time, we have a little girl character to be helpless instead of Scott Speedman.

Adding a kid to the mix is always a sign of desperation

The only thing that kept me interested in the film was pointing out conceptual flaws in it.  For instance, if vampires have been hunted to the brink of extinction by man, then it can be concluded that technology and superior numbers are what gave man the edge.  And yet, the difficulties vampires have with humans seems to only be dictated by the script.  When Selene needs to be captured, she gets blown up; when she needs to escape, she kills four heavily armed men that have her in their gun sights with ease.  And if vampires are that fast, why don't we see that more often?  The only new element that this sequel added was a non-powered human doing some of the killing, and even his scenes were hilariously unlikely.  My personal favorite was when Michael Ealy was firing at a car and managed to kill the driver and shoot out the a front tire with only three bullets.

Even he doesn't believe he's that good of a shot

Underworld: Awakening probably wasn't designed to bring in a new audience.  If you thought that a series about vampires and werewolves trying to kill each other with guns was incredibly stupid before (and it is), this movie isn't going to change your mind.  I've always enjoyed laughing at these movies, but this was just plain boring.  While the action was plentiful, it was nothing new.  While the story was stupid, it wasn't stupid-funny.  I was hoping for a mindless action movie, but what I got was just mindless.  In short, this movie sucks.  And not in the "sexy leather-clad vampire" sort of way.