Gemini Man (2019)

This action idea was birthed back in 1997 and now over twenty years on it’s evident why it took so long to get made and you’ll wonder why it ever did, because even with Ang Lee directing, this is something that doesn’t reach the heights of a premise which isn’t even that unique.

Henry Brogan (Will Smith) is a for-hire assassin who wishes to retire but when he receives intel that a recent kill has more secrets than expected, he has to flee his home and with the aide of agent Dani (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), they hope to find out the truth. Unluckily for Brogan, a Gemini project has sent a highly skilled killer (also Smith) after them.

Obviously when conceived back in the late 90’s, this story would have been ripe for the times and something interestingly different but now it hasn’t even got that going for it. The only reason for its existence is because the technology is available to de-age a star and have them play in the film twice. This uncanny valley thing is a model becoming more frequent within movies as utilised nicely in ‘Captain Marvel’, but when in close-up the CGI rendering of young Will Smith is smoothed to gross levels. There’s something in the way his mouth moves that looks like a 2010 video game cut-scene and is extremely off-putting.

In terms of the action itself, then you’re in for a bad trip to the cinema because there aren’t any set pieces which stand up to the test of memory. There’s a motorbike chase but Tom Cruise has zero to worry about because everything is frenetic and when Smith doesn’t die after taking an accelerated tyre to the face you know how much suspension of disbelief to contain. Later on, in the catacombs of Budapest everything becomes a scrambling mess as the two Wills tussle into skulls. All you can do is squint as Winstead is left as a light source on a choppily edited fight where you cannot make heads or tails who’s beating up who.

The movie only looks nicely framed in places because of them jetting to Budapest. It’s clearly an excuse to muster production in a stunning albeit cheap city but all the characters do there is talk. If I didn’t love the Hungarian capital so much, I’d give this film an even lower rating. There really is not anything about the story that stands out, everything is predictable and with one of the ‘Game of Thrones’ writers behind this screenplay you can understand the absence of sense or strength behind this film.

Backgrounds and foregrounds look oddly shoddy with this film, Ang Lee’s desire for the High Frame Rate makes the standard showing of the movie a glaringly distracting one. It’s as if nothing sits quite right within the world of the movie and not even some good tension in the opening of the movie or Smith’s dual performance can save the film from being a marketing tactic coasting on the fact that it has a Smith dual performance.

‘Gemini Man’ is a two-handed disappointment of being disappointing and underwhelming. There’s a general air of average quality surrounding the entire idea.

5/10

Red Sparrow (2018)

A thriller film is my favourite type of genre to watch, add spies to the mix and you’re surely onto a boiling pot of suspense, substance and ultimately a winner, right? In the case of Francis Lawrence’s new release, starring Katniss Everdeen from his previous directorial work, we get a rather stale movie with less thrills than expected.

Ex-ballerina Dominika (Jennifer Lawrence) ends up seeing a bloody murder and to keep herself alive she’s ushered into the Russian intelligence as a Sparrow; an operative with the skills to employ seduction as a weapon. Meanwhile, CIA operative Nate (Joel Edgerton) is being tracked by the Russians, after an asset meeting, which leads them to believe the Americans are trying to keep this mysterious mole a safe secret.

‘Red Sparrow’ is deserving of its certification, it’s a ton more brutal than I expected. The amount of sexual violence, murder and torture give this a movie a definite blood soaked edge and gritty quality but more often than not it’s there as shock value and not much else below the surface. It’s with the sexualisation that this feature has been scraping up lots of problems and I agree with the majority of those comments. It’s not insanely gratuitous all the way through but and this is a big but, the movie fully seems to revel in the ‘whore school’ aspect of training and selling itself as a talking point of the skin factor with its leading lady showcasing her body.

This manipulative manner of training young cadets hoping to be important spies for Mother Russia, may be apt and the humiliation they go through is something I can truly believe still happens in the process of training, but this movie feels so cold and calculated to be more about style than any intriguing substance. Unlike the well constructed suspense and Cold War stakes of television series, ‘The Americans’, this film fails to follow in that vein in any sense, there are no interesting dynamics behind closed doors, it seems to merely wallow in the easy exploitation of its Sparrows and degrading J Law in flesh revealing outfits.

Francis Lawrence directs in an uneven manner, the movie totally meanders from scene to scene and this is what causes the pace to suffer. I did find the final thirty minutes to be of more interest as the mystery began to finally unravel more than before and frequent twists and turns came into play. The final ploy by Dominika is well executed and sustained my interest nicely and with a bubbling score to add tension it woke me up. Generally though, this is a long film that feels long; one that made me almost bored of what can only be described as a bland thriller.

Jennifer Lawrence is the best aspect in this entire thing, she’s a fine actor and she goes through a wheelhouse of almost every emotion as a spy taught to seduce and stay one step ahead. Joel Edgerton possesses a vague Yankee charisma as the American for J Law to keep in contact with but there’s something almost dimly grey about his performance, as with Charlotte Rampling and Jeremy Irons who both appear to be giving about 20% to their characters. Matthias Schoenaerts is the next best performer as a man carrying untrustworthy motives like a suitcase, in his convincing turn as a rather creepy uncle.

There are minor moments when this ‘thriller’ is faintly intelligent and committed to espionage-like drama but it’s nowhere near as slick or smart as I think it believes itself to be.

5.5/10