Gemini Man (2019)

[baumer]

Discuss

[Webslinger]

There’s so much untapped potential in Gemini Man that it’s tough to come away satisfied with what’s onscreen. Even dismissing the higher expectations that spring from having a director as accomplished as Ang Lee at the helm, it feels like a competent but underwhelming film that *wants* to engage with intriguing ideas, but never fully gets there. The biggest narrative problem lies in focusing on the elder Will Smith character rather than his younger clone; while the film could have used this concept as a means of exploring how people lose a step with age and envy qualities of their past selves, the older Smith character is such a nondescript bore and the younger one is such a potentially fascinating case in bioethics and “nature vs. nurture” that I could not help but think that the film would have been much more interesting with the perspective flipped from the get-go. As is, the narrative is so simple that it feels like either a serious piece of hard sci-fi dulled for the masses or an absurd Face/Off-style high-concept film that the studio mistakenly tried to class up (the involvement of Billy Ray and David Benioff suggests the latter, but who knows?). In the dual lead role, Will Smith is okay; his mostly serious approach works for his older self, but it’s a bit jarring to see him apply the same serious to his de-aged clone when his younger roles in real life were so much livelier and more charismatic. Mary Elizabeth Winstead gets as much mileage as she can out of a thankless, underwritten role as Smith’s sidekick; she’s good enough here that I wish she could have gotten more to do. Clive Owen, however, is flat as the villain – thus dulling some of the climax’s impact. Ang Lee’s direction of action sequences is impeccable and the film looks stellar throughout (I saw it in standard projection), but his restrained approach doesn’t always gel with the script. Had the film been more tonally consistent and undergone sharper script revisions, it could have been something special. As is, Gemini Man is just a frustratingly generic film that feels like it should have been anything but generic.

 

C+

[ainsleyb]

Agree with the above, there is untapped potential and a lot more they could have done with this story but for a ‘generic’ action film, I liked it. The action scenes themselves are directed far more competently that you would probably expect from a film that critics have trashed. The motorbike chase in particular  has a distinctive eye that you would expect a director of Lee’s capabilities to be able of.

 

Its not ground breaking but I’ve seen much worse action fodder in the past few years.

 

6/10

[Webslinger]

This movie has not held up well in my memory in the week since I saw it (I’d shift the grade down a notch). In hindsight, I think the biggest and easiest creative and financial fix would have been to lean right into Will Smith’s star persona, especially for the younger clone. Smith became a megastar because he always carried himself as a megastar; he didn’t really need the Hollywood hype machine because he had the swagger and charisma to be his own hype machine in the ‘90s. Had the film been lighter and given us a young Will Smith more akin to the real one we saw 20-odd years ago, I think the film could have been much more entertaining and would have had a much better shot at the big box office gross Paramount undoubtedly envisioned.