Own the rights?
With the action heroes of my generation all too old or M.I.A. (Ford, Hackman, Eastwood), I have consistently made the comment, "Thank God for Bruce Willis". Good ole Bruce, aging towards his mid-fifties, consistently brings action films to our local theatres year after year after year. As an actor, he has 70+ projects contained within his historical biography and the guy keeps making bad films mediocre and mediocre films watchable.Surprisingly, he has but one credit to his name in 2009, Surrogates, a film that looks ripped from just about every other science fiction fantasy you have ever seen or read.Extracted by a graphic novel by Robert Venditti and Brett Weldele, Surrogates transports us to a future where people live through robotic surrogates from the privacy and safety of their own sanctuary and can manipulate their avatars into either copies of themselves or they can transform themselves into just about anything they want (I say just about anything because the world was not full of Megan Fox's). The opening credits give us a 14 year history of how we got to whatever future we are in at Present Day.But when a murder – the first in an eon – occurs, FBI agent Greer (Willis) is assigned the case and his subsequent investigation outside of his own surrogate is filled with enough revelations to bring down the entire Utopian world.I can't even begin to ramble of the countless movies the Surrogates borrows from in an effort to keep us entertained for the very swift 88 minutes of running time. Hell, there were even a few television programs I thought it copied for certain scenes.That noted, Surrogates is not all that bad. Director Jonathon Mostow (Terminator 3 – which I actually liked) might not have put the most seasoned piece of sci-fi on the screen, but he could have done much worse with the cheesy premise.The special effects are kinda few and kinda crappy. A scene with a surrogate riding on the hood of a car was blue screen embarrassment. But the special effects are kept in tow as Mostow tries for more of an atmosphere than he does an all out future world experience.Bruce Willis always throws me off in movies where he has hair and Ving Rhames shows up as a human (?) who opposes the surrogate conglomerate. It's been 15 years since Rhames and Willis had screen time together and I was thankful there was no plastic ball in their mouth and a gimp parading in front of them while they approached their purpose in the script.Surprisingly, for all the borrowing and lack of any true originality, Surrogates, is watchable. The ideas are all squished (think of a marshmallow being squeezed through a key hole) into an entertaining if not enthralling sit that might not exactly be worth $50 and a babysitter to make a night out of, but it can easily be a rewarding DVD rental in the new year.Recommendation is clearly to rent it.www.killerreviews.com
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