![]() ![]() Whenever Winstead faces the youthful and middle-aged Smiths, I keep hoping she’ll sing, “They’re either too young or too old.” Smith’s Brogan acts so resolutely un-charming that when he talks her into a having a drink, it makes sense only because she’s paid to keep an eye on him. She starts out surveilling Brogan and becomes his unromantic ally. He doesn’t get any rhythm going with Benedict Wong, stranded in the sidekick role of Brogan’s longest surviving buddy and ace pilot, or with Mary Elizabeth Winstead, who keeps searching for a persuasive way to humanize a DIA op. Smith won’t allow the rare comic breeze to ripple through his thick air of anguish. In the press notes Lee says he wants “drama” and “levity” and “some kind of a wicked sense of humor to blend the two together.” He must not have let Smith in on the plan. (The digital trickery involved Smith performing Brogan with the improbably named Victor Hugo as his stand-in clone, then switching roles and acting the youthful duplicate himself, in a performance-capture body suit and helmet.) The plot may sound appealing if you haven’t seen Smith’s reflexes dull to a genial blur in recent movies like Aladdin. The digital technology that makes it possible for middle-aged Brogan to confront his whippersnapper clone might be impressive if most of the cast-even Clive Owen as Gemini’s evil founder-didn’t seem computer generated themselves. The powers-that-be fear that Brogan, tipped off by a pal (played very briefly by Douglas Hodge), could bring their secret clone program to light. ![]() He doesn’t want his dimming powers to endanger innocents after 72 supposedly righteous kills already burden his conscience. Brogan puts his trigger-finger to rest after he kills a man on a distant moving train with a shot to the neck, though he aimed for the head. Will Smith plays Henry Brogan, a crack assassin for the Defense Intelligence Agency who retires at 51 only to be targeted by his previously unknown 23-year-old clone, part of a private para-military group called Gemini that does the DIA’s dirty work. Seven years after the enormous critical and commercial success of his earlier 3D fantasy, Life of Pi (2012), Ang Lee gives us Gemini Man, an epic sci-fi fiasco that should be called Life of Null. ![]()
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