Bruce Willis + Action = Surrogates

Its Bruce Willis! In an action movie! Are you suprised?! Yeah, me neither.

Surrogates

starring Bruce Willis, Radha Mitchell, Rosamund Pike, Boris Kodjoe, James Cromwell, Ving Rhames

directed by Jonathan Mostow

So, this film had a ton of factors going for it. Number one, its an action flick, and America loves the action. Two, the Bruce. Who doesn’t like to watch a movie as long as Bruce Willis is in the lead role? Three, its based on an independant comic book series that doesn’t involve heroics and tights. All of these should have made for an interesting and outstanding film; but somehow, I left the theater feeling nothing but apathy about what I had just seen.

Flash forward fourteen years. A company called VSI, formerly lead by Dr. Canter (Cromwell), has created what has become known as surrogates. Surrogates are life like robots that are controlled by a person’s mind. So, the idea is that you can stay locked away at home, safe, and control this machine that goes out into the world for you. No more crime, no more murder, no more fear of what could happen to you, exposed to the world. However, the veil of security fails when surrogates start turning up fried to a crisp, and their human host dies along with them. FBI agents Greer (Willis) and Peters (Mitchell) are on the investigation, and it turns out one of the first homicides is the son of the creator of the machines, Dr. Canter. He has since been outed by the company and has hidden from the public eye for some time because he is now anti-surrogacy. As the mystery thickens, it turns out Canter himself was supposed to be the target of an assassination plot using this unknown weapon that kills surrogates and their hosts. Ironically, Greer’s surrogate is destroyed in a chase to find the weapon, and now his old and broken body must be drug outdoors to find out just what this conspiracy is all about, and how far down the rabbit hole goes.

Mostow delivers another dull but par action flick, much like his Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. The action sequences are fantastic, and the film has a real pace to it that every good action film should have. My only problem is the lack of care for depth of character. Its obvious that he tried with the scenes that briefly delve into Greer’s distraught personal life, but it feels vague at best. The film attempts to grasp at what is lost when you live through a machine; no sensual feelings, no interaction, living isolated and alone.  However, Mostow gives you no real reason to care for the characters or what happens to them, and in a movie that is supposed to emphasize that life needs to be experienced through living, it just doesn’t work.

There were problems with the CGI, too. The surrogate versions of people were obviously airbrushed, which I could live with because these robots are supposed to be perfect. But with Willis’s copy in particular, it just looked majorly fake. And you could tell they had problems with the airbrushing because when Willis’s surrogate speaks, the camera doesn’t look at him. Guess they couldn’t deal with the mouth movement too well with all the heavy handed computer imaging. And for that matter, why does Bruce Willis have to spend the better half of all his movies walking around beaten and bloodied? It just gets old. To his credit, though, Mr. Willis plays the part of a worn out and disallusioned man who’s spent the better part of seven years in a chair hooked into a machine quite well. Should Bruce branch out from his standard action vehicles? Sure, but the man still has talent, don’t forget that.

Further more, if you’re paying attention, Dr. Canter is a creator that has turned against his creation because of the dangerous implications of the long term effects on humans. James Cromwell, who plays Canter, played a very, very similiar character in I, Robot. In that film, he was the mastermind of the creation of the service robots who is eventually killed trying to shut them all down. That is…irritating, to say the least.

I don’t mean to talk nothing but down on the film. It was good, entertaining, and I would recommend it to all you die hard action fans out there (you see what I did with the word play there?). I’ve just come to expect more out of Bruce Willis then this. I’ve come to expect more out of all my actions films, really. Hollywood, if you really want us to continue to see your action sagas, give us well thought out plot lines and characters that have more depth than a bird bath that’s have empty. Just blowing stuff up and coming up with a gimmicky premise isn’t going to work anymore. Audience, see it if you like the Bruce. Otherwise, its missable.