Henry is an assassin, but one with a moral code. Henry Brogen is a particularly nineties sort of protagonist, even beyond being played by Will Smith. “ Which is no war.” These are soldiers at the end of history. The characters in Gemini Man are veterans of the first Gulf War, dialogue explicitly referencing “ Kuwait” rather than “ Iraq.” There is a sense that the characters are seeking an end not to a specific war, but to the concept of war in general. While there are hints of more modern anxieties and themes in the that way that Gemini Man awkwardly intersects with War on Terror concerns about private military contractors operating without accountability or oversight, it taps into a broader sense of existential unease. While the decision to film in Hungary was undoubtedly motivated by modern financial incentives, the Eastern European setting lends the movie the feel and texture of those post-Cold War thrillers that were common after the fall of the Berlin Wall, like GoldenEye or the opening scenes of Mission: Impossible. There is a sense in which the film stems from the chaos of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the erosion of the ordering principles of the Cold War. The anxieties at play in Gemini Man hark back to those of turn-of-the-millennium films like The Sixth Day or Gattaca, tapping into fears about the potential repercussions of the human genome project as comparable to those of splitting the atom.Įven more than that, Gemini Man makes a point to trace its central cloning experiment back to research that leaked out of Russia at the end of the Cold War. During the obligatory exposition-in-a-spa scene, the scientist who helpfully provides the movie’s back story even explicitly cites Dolly the Sheep as a point of reference. The movie’s central plot hinges on a top secret cloning experiment. Just as it was with The Hobbit films, this type of shooting is not a good fit for effects-laden CGI movies.Watching Gemini Man, it often feels as though the script itself might date back to the nineties. Any element of realism is almost instantly lost. The sets look like sets, the green screen backgrounds look like green screen backgrounds and Will Smith’s de-aged, CGI double jumps the whole breadth of uncanny valley. The use of 120 fps High Frame Rate 3D lends the film an interesting aesthetic at first, but once the action sequences and effects-heavy scenes begin to ramp up, it only serves to hinder proceedings and make everything look disappointingly manufactured and fake. Some of this would be forgivable if the story embraced the plot’s ridiculousness and didn’t play everything so straight, but the screenwriters never once indulge in this. Worse still, the younger version of Smith’s character never feels like a credible threat, stripping the film of its tension and rendering the point of the whole shebang somewhat pointless. Plot contrivances aplenty rear themselves throughout, all building to a twist that isn’t in the least surprising or remotely satisfying, before simply ending on some unearned schmaltz. The true issue behind this no doubt lies within the script, a dated and plodding tome that contains awful dialogue and cringe interactions by the bucketload. The occasionally inventive shots do little to distract from what is, quite honestly, beneath him, whilst his lead actor is perhaps at his most bland and un-charismatic (something which always seemed impossible for a genuine star like Will Smith). Though it has moments of flair that show-off the Oscar-winning maestro’s talents, it ultimately feels painfully average in comparison to previous studio films from Lee. Make no mistake, Gemini Man is easily the most generic and dull movie Ang Lee has ever made. The assassin they send to kill him? A younger clone of Henry (also Smith)! Cue shock and horror! Gemini Man concerns 50-something assassin Henry Brogan ( Will Smith) who finds himself pursued by both his former agency and a top-secret black ops unit code-named “GEMINI”. Challenging is certainly a word that best describes Gemini Man, though that’s more to describe the experience of sitting through it! Having already sharpened his claws bringing a convincing CGI Tiger to life in the sublime Life of Pi (2012), director Ang Lee is back with another challenging effects-heavy movie.
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