'Generic' & 'Uninspired': Not Even Two Will Smith's Can Save 'Gemini Man'

GEMINI MAN

★★1/2

In all the various promotional ‘featurettes’ for Ang Lee’s Gemini Man, viewers are treated to a suite of breathless exhortations from cast, crew, and producers assuring you that some whole new revolutionary cinematic paradigm has arrived. No matter what you’ve previously seen, nothing can prepare you for its ‘3D+’ presentation; which is, effectively, a 3D movie shot with a super high frame rate. Everything is more realistic and immersive than ever, and everything will never be the same.

Except, when you actually see Gemini Man, in a free pair of plastic glasses, the visual effect — you can really see every one of Will Smith’s knuckle hairs with vivid clarity! — soon fades way. And what you’re left watching feels exactly the same as usual. Narratively speaking, there is no new paradigm at play. Whilst its central premise — Smith plays both an ageing hitman and, via de-ageing technology, a younger clone of himself — is also a vehicle for technological achievement, as a plot device that premise only gives birth to a another rote action movie about a man on the run from a sinister organisation, killing countless people until all is put ‘right’ and we end with a six months later happily ever after.

It’s no surprise to learn that Gemini Man — a story saturated in middle-aged male anxiety re: growing redundancy, creeping mortality, being superseded by a subsequent generation — was first conceived in 1997, and that early attempts to mount a production were set to star people like Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Mel Gibson. Because, for all its high-tech digital imaging, Gemini Man feels really 1990s. In fact, its spiritual successors are that run of 1990s Jean-Claude van Damme movies where he kept playing two characters, or two versions of the same person: Double Impact, Timecop, Maximum Risk, Replicant. Except instead of martial arts high kicks and doing the splits, this time we just got people being shot. Lots and lots of people.

If there’s a sure sign of the regressive storytelling overwhelming the progressive presentation, it comes with the endless gunfire. After Suicide Squad, here’s Smith playing another anti-hero whose entire characterisation is ‘what a great shot, what a lot of guns’. Here’s Smith in a movie where other characters say things like “you’re still the best we’ve got”, just to let you know he’s the best. In certain scenes, the ‘immersiveness’ of the 3D+, and the attendant sound design, is incredible; the thunderous pop of gunshots in a Big Willie vs Lil’ Willie stairwell standoff is Heat-shootout levels of evocative. But, by the time you’ve watched hundreds upon hundreds of anonymous, video-game-fodder-esque figures get shot, all the gunfire ends up seeming banal, almost boring. Especially given we know where this locomotive plot is chugging along to, it’d be nice if there were some smaller surprises to distract from the formulaic familiarities.

There is one sequence in Gemini Man that can be unreservedly recommended, though, especially for fans of shitty ’90s action movies: an awesome motorcycle chase through the winding streets of Cartagena, Colombia. Here, Lee and DOP Dion Beebe get inventive with their ‘immersive’ visual presentation: endless POV shots, wild close-ups, shots where the camera either throttles towards or away from various vehicles. It’s energetic, kinetic filmmaking, and it gets pleasingly ridiculous when the younger Will uses a motorcycle as a kind of martial arts weapon.

There are other moments here where Lee stages a memorable visual: an orange flare dropped into electric green water at the bottom of a subterranean catacomb, for example; taking use of the one-hour-photo colour-grading that makes its frame rate feel hyper-real. But, given the bustle of the action and the barrages of automatic weapon fire, there’s no chance for Lee to really explore the extra dimension of the 3D frame, as he did memorably in the otherwise not-at-all-memorable Life Of Pi.

Speaking of which, with his recent run of films — Life Of Pi, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, and Gemini Man— Lee is clearly becoming one of those old men who love gear; his turn towards the technical mirroring the late-career downturns of people like George Lucas, Peter Jackson, and James Cameron. At this point, it’s hard to know what to make of Lee, a director whose post-breakout filmography boasts masterpieces (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; Brokeback Mountain; Lust, Caution), misfires (Ride With The Devil; Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk), and steaming piles of shit (Hulk; Taking Woodstock).

Gemini Man fits in none of those categories. Lee’s never made something quite this generic, or worked from a screenplay this uninspired. With sequels to Bad Boys and Bright on the horizon, however, Smith is clearly at home with the generic and uninspired.

HUSTLERS

★★★

“This city, this whole country, is a strip club,” pronounces Jennifer Lopez, near the close of Hustlers. “You’ve got people tossing the money, and people doing the dance.” It’s a great line, right up there with Brad Pitt’s final pronouncement at the end of Andrew Dominik’s Killing Them Softly: “America’s not a country, it’s just a business. Now fucking pay me.”

Here, too, with Hustlers, is another film in which criminality is seen as indivisible from late-period capitalism. Based on real life scams, it’s about a group of strippers who take to fishing for clients, drugging them, then ringing up ungodly sums on their credit cards. Their victims are, notably, Wall Street bros, the kind of men who once came in and made it rain in the club voluntarily, before the GFC killed that party. The crimes these men’ve committed against other people — fraudulent investments with pension funds and retirement nest eggs — are far worse than what’s being done to them, J-Lo rationalises, with surprisingly sound logic.

Making stripping a symbol of capitalist exchange will naturally invite comparisons to Magic Mike, and, in such, director Lorene Scafaria certainly doesn’t have the compositional chops of Steven Soderbergh (though there is a memorable tracking shot, mid-movie, following Constance Wu into dropping her daughter off at school before a parade of judging eyes, only for her to turn around and reveal the telltale reason they’ve been staring). Instead, much of it feels like familiar Scorsese-ism — the big needle drops leading to montages of ill-gotten lucre — with a you-go-girl twist; this reaching a feverish pique that is less commentary on late-period capitalism, more valentine unto it.

What sets Hustlers apart from other criminality-as-commentary-on-society films is just how earnest its heart is. The drama is essentially a platonic love story between Lopez and Wu, the queen of the scene and the girl she takes under her arm. When things, inevitably, fall apart, the emotional stakes carry more weight than the criminal stakes. And Wu, especially in the being-interviewed framing narrative, plays her role like a lover spurned, wounded and insecure. Even in the narrative ‘now’, she’s still inextricably linked to the woman who roped her into that All-American pastime: a criminal enterprise.

THE KING

★★★1/2

With the internet’s boyfriend Timothée Chalamet wearing the titular crown, The King finds David Michôd working from Shakespeare, but doing something not Shakespearean. Telling the tale of wayward Prince Hal becoming King Henry V, the ascendant Australian auteur is drawing from ol’ Billy’s ‘Henriad’ (Richard II, Henry IV part 1 & 2, Henry V), but without the iambic pentameter, the sense of theatre, the devilish delight in wordplay and skulduggery. Instead, this Henry the fifth is a grim tale, solemnly told. And much too dour to crack the Oscar season it was undoubtedly aimed at being a part of.

This epic was produced by Netflix, and the prestige picture cash resonates on the big screen (where The King is showing, briefly, before being dropped onto the streaming service). The many elements of the movie betray its well-bankrolled status. Michôd is a thoughtful, inventive director; and, here, working with ace Australian DOP Adam Arkapaw, he paints a colourless world in various shades of brown, grey, and steely blue. Nicholas Britell, whose score for If Beale Street Could Talk could ring tears from a block of stone, authors great compositions; especially the airy, almost-levitating heralds that play as English troops march down French trails.

And the acting is all top shelf: Chalamet moves from aloof to brooding beautifully; Joel Edgerton is BOG as a drunk Falstaff full of both equanimity and military strategy; Ben Mendelsohn is greasy-as-fuck as a King Henry IV everyone is waiting to see die; Robert Pattinson does a lot in playing the Dauphin as a louche, ridiculous, devilish dandy; Thomasin McKenzie, as a married-off sister visiting from her stint as teenaged Queen of Denmark, is as wide-eyed and flighty as a hunted creature; and in a late, sterling turn, Lily-Rose Depp elevates beyond her It Girl beginnings with a commanding turn as a French princess.

All these outstanding compositional parts don’t, however, cohere into a masterpiece. There’s no shame in this: The King is no revolutionary work of art, but still a finely-judged drama, a measured depiction of power, corruption, and militarism that delivers all manner of pro-England orations yet, somehow, in a Time Of Brexit, isn’t repellent. On the big screen, the breadth of its artistic vision and the length of its narrative (140 minutes) are both plaudits. But, as mere streaming service fodder, it’s likely to get lost in the shuffle; too long, too slow, and too artful to pop out from the small screen’s cacophony of infinite content, to seize a streamer’s arrested attention span.

WORKING WOMAN

★★★★

A young mother gets a job working for a sleazy real estate developer in Tel Aviv, and duly is met with unwanted sexual advances. Michal Aviad’s stern drama — which has obvious grand cultural resonances in the wake of Harvey Weinstein and the #MeToo movement — is unafraid of inhabiting the uncomfortable.

Like its lead, Orna (an excellent Liron Ben-Shlush), Working Woman is a film that avoids big conflicts. She only wants to survive at her job; and the fact that her creepy boss (Menashe Noy, full of note-prefect entitlement) so ardently believes in her work stokes contradictory feelings, and provokes rationalisations as to his predatory behaviour. In such, this a keen-eyed study of the power imbalance in a workplace relationship, where the person with that power unilaterally tries to push that relationship from the professional towards the personal.

Ben-Shlush’s titular character starts out full of hope for her new career, only to be slowly disabused of any such innocence. Soon, she feels like she has to swallow her pride in order to survive at work; the sliminess of her boss just something she has to ‘deal with’ at work, and something she tries to leave behind when back at home with husband — a failing restaurateur who is anything but the supportive husband — and kids. Aviad makes much of the drama a study in her silence, which is a mixture of complicity, repression, and unmistakable shame. Working Woman is a film that conveys her sense of helplessness, but is more remarkable as a film about loneliness. Lost in a nightmare, its would-be career woman feels trapped, unable to even reach out for help.