**/****
starring Colin Farrell, Kate Beckinsale, Jessica Biel, Bill Nighy
screenplay by Kurt Wimmer and Mark Bomback, based on a screenplay by Ronald Shusett & Dan O'Bannon and the short story "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale" by Philip K. Dick
directed by Len Wiseman
by Walter Chaw For about forty minutes, maybe less, Len Wiseman's ironically forgettable Total Recall redux demonstrates energy, inventiveness, and proper respect for Blade Runner's production design, at least, if not for its own predecessor. By the end, it's just a bigger-budget Lockout that not only doesn't do anything with the Philip K. Dick source material, but is also wholly incapable of trumping the absolute, tripping-balls perversity of the Paul Verhoeven original. It's a problem that not even resurrecting the three-titted hooker can solve, especially since her appearance in this Total Recall highlights not the mutagenic strangeness of Mars but the oddness of…Australia? It's Colin Farrell this time around as everyman Douglas Quaid, stepping in for Ah-nuld of course and, in so doing, making the film's one possible narrative reality that Quaid is actually a Bourne-like super-agent less a possibility. Farrell is in fact too good at being ordinary–the long introduction that establishes Quaid's boring workaday existence is arguably the best thing about the whole thing. There's real pain there when he doesn't get a desired promotion, real desperation in his coming home to a sleeping wife before going out again to drink cheap beer with his assembly-line buddy. The result of Farrell's being kind of a really great actor is that he (like Guy Pearce in Lockout) instantly reveals the vehicle and its execution to be not nearly good enough, its aspirations not nearly high enough. And whatever questions the picture asks in the pursuit of metafiction, well, Farrell is capable of conveying more.
Quaid, tired of his workaday drudge commuting from Australia to London via a centre-of-the-earth elevator/subway, visits a company called Rekall to be implanted with memories that will ostensibly spice up his grey study. His hot wife Lori (Kate Beckinsale, Wiseman's own hot wife) comments on her hotness at one point in a way that speaks true to every man's insecurity about having married up; and his world, devastated by a chemical war that has left only two habitable places (luckily, neither houses many minorities–and how much more interesting is this movie instantly if the two places left are Japan and Sudan?), is nonetheless astonishingly technologically advanced. I don't really want to get into it. During the Rekall procedure, Quaid–pointedly reading a ratty paperback of Ian Fleming's The Spy Who Loved Me–requests Bondian dreams; something goes wrong, a police strike-force breaks in, and Quaid discovers, in a scene stolen from The Bourne Identity, that he's already a super-spy. If it's all not obvious enough, the final shot of the film is a lingering hold on the Rekall billboard. Here's the thing: Verhoeven's Total Recall isn't obvious. Whatever its excesses and grotesqueries, Verhoeven's version is smart, sharp, and ultimately respectful of its audience's ability to appreciate ambiguity. It's a risky film, where Wiseman's is as smooth and frictionless as the latex his wife wears in the Underworld saga. I think that once Farrell steps into the agent role, he has difficulty convincing us he was ever in the factory-worker role; because he lacks Schwarzenegger's innate dorkiness, suddenly this Total Recall is only complex for that dummy Quaid. It's not an existential crisis, it's an empty action movie, and Farrell knows it. And so do we.
Beckinsale has become an extremely credible action heroine, however. Scenes where she springs into feral, acrobatic motion are tight and exciting. I love the rooftop chase for its simplicity, for Wiseman's casual subversion of an action-movie cliché, for the smart use of environment in its maze of barriers and openings. I like a moment where Wiseman pays homage to the death of Zhora in Blade Runner and that film's visually-arresting umbrellas, and I even like the resolution to an otherwise-boring and overlong hover-car chase that Spielberg did better in his Dick-flick, Minority Report. I do wonder if Wiseman isn't something like the Von Sternberg to Beckinsale's Dietrich, though, in that as soon as he's not shooting Beckinsale doing her thing, the movie loses its sparkle, such as it is. Look at the care Wiseman lavishes on a sequence in which Lori slides across a floating elevator and in through an access panel: there's more timing and invention in those few seconds of film than in the entirety of Total Recall's bombastic, senseless finale. The only time someone like Kate Beckinsale could be the most notable element of a movie also starring Farrell and, in supporting roles, Bryan Cranston and Bill Nighy, is when her husband's directing it. As the picture lumbers along, shedding sense and invention and gaining an army of the stupid robots from I, Robot that function like the stupid robots from Episode I, it becomes clearer that Total Recall doesn't have anything up its sleeve besides that one sleight of hand. Beckinsale looks like a star in it when we know that she's not; I've already pretty much forgotten the rest.
Thanks for the warning….
“Get your ass to”… Australia? :-/
Ah well.
I really like the original for the reasons you mention. It’s just creative and odd and that makes it stick. I wonder how interesting this movie could’ve been if Beckinsale were the secret agent and Farrell was the hunky eye-candy husband? And they avoided or at least exploited the conventions while telling a great Philip K. Dick yarn? We’ll never know.
I’m confused Mr. Walter Chaw…you wrote “Chemical war that has left only two habitable places (luckily, neither house many minorities…)”. Was that irony or a suggestion on your part that having no minorities is “lucky”? I saw an early screening and this movie and agree tha Beckinsale was the best part of the film.
EZ, I interpret that line as sarcasm, as in it’s lucky for the movie that they didn’t have to cast minorities. Hence the note about Sudan and Japan immediately afterwards. Hollywood is notoriously shy about having a mostly-“minority” cast out of some fear that the perceived majority won’t show up to see it.
Re: Arnold’s dorkiness (heh), I recall reading the novelization of the Verhoeven version before the movie came out, by Piers Anthony of all people, and it made a point of noting Quaid felt like a fifth wheel in his life. He felt like the only thing he had going for him was being muscular, that otherwise he felt dumb and goofy. I thought it a good characterization of Arnold when I actually saw the movie so you’re pretty spot-on there.
The original had a great script, but it was ruined by Verhoeven’s sloppy, coke-fueled direction and gaffes like soldiers standing in a circle shooting at a hologram. Its big accomplishment was the greatest nose-picking scene in film history. So it was ripe for a remake, but not a bland one.
I always thought the lead role called for an actor with depth, so it’s an interesting point that Arnold’s dorkiness is a plus. The thought of Beckinsdale in the lead is even more interesting, but alas, too late for that.
It was not ripe for a remake. STOP WITH THE ENDLESS REMAKES
I think Mars was nixed this time around because Hollywood’s now very superstitious about the number of movies that flop with Mars in the title. Mission to Mars, John Carter, Mars Needs Moms, Red Planet, et al. Ironically, if Total Recall 2012’s really this unremarkable (haven’t seen it), it would probably have helped having the hero go to a future-Mars environment. Well, visually.
Beckinsale’s a curious case. She’s the British Mila Jovovich in my mind, but more of a loss to Hollywood… because, pre-Underworld, she was actually a decent actress who deserved better. Now she’s a surprisingly good action movie star who doesn’t actually get to appear in good action movies.
Mars was nixed because in the BOOK he doesn’t go to MARS!
> I wonder how interesting this movie could’ve been if Beckinsale were the secret agent and Farrell was the hunky eye-candy husband?
Whoa. That’s as good a swap as a Jude Law-Matt Damon would have been in The Talented Mr. Ripley. With a female lead, TR would have been an entirely different movie.
The ‘science-fiction’ in films like have made the premise for Recall pretty generic. Like Sound of My Voice and Another Earth or Memento, this film could have done a better job via lo-fi production values — the science-fiction elements were visual candy. Most of them were unnecessary to sustain the plot.
Holy crap did this movie suck. The excessive use of artificial lens flares was particularly obnoxious. That and empty, nonsensical action. Not sure why Wiseman gets credit for constructing good action scenes.