{"id":3979,"date":"2012-08-09T14:16:46","date_gmt":"2012-08-09T20:16:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/?p=3979"},"modified":"2012-08-09T14:16:46","modified_gmt":"2012-08-09T20:16:46","slug":"a-total-satire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/?p=3979","title":{"rendered":"A TOTAL SATIRE"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Like the 1990 picture of the same name, the 2012 Total Recall is drawn from the Philip K. Dick short story \u201cWe Can Remember It for You Wholesale.\u201d Both versions use the Dick story mostly as an excuse for a bizarro action movie, with Dick\u2019s famously paranoid frenzies (psychological, political and cultural) treated variously as mere generic dystopian backdrop.<\/p>\n

The R-rated 1990 version may have had more a Dickian \u201cedge,\u201d but the new one (rated a softer PG-13) at least holds its own as a B-movie fandango with high-tech furnishings. Here again, furious pacing and crazed iconography take precedence over narrative coherence and dramatic emotion.<\/p>\n

The preview trailers in particular make this new Total Recall look like an empty exercise in video-game imagery, but on the big screen Len Wiseman\u2019s film has an appealing kinetic energy for most of its two-hour running time. There\u2019s plenty of CGI in action and settings alike, but not so much that a certain visceral sense of the characters\u2019 physical reality gets entirely lost.<\/p>\n

Wiseman\u2019s cast, headed by Colin Farrell and Kate Beckinsale, delivers a sort of pulp-fiction vitality, even as the special effects approach a suffocating critical mass. Farrell does yeoman duty as a troubled bloke who is both \u201cordinary\u201d and possessed of action-hero capabilities. As the women in his puzzlingly multi-layered life, Beckinsale and Jessica Biel are the yin and yang of an action-boy fantasy girl.<\/p>\n

The archvillain Cohaagen (Bryan Cranston) is an all-purpose evil dictator, mad scientist, technocratic megalomaniac outfitted with both an absurdly Byzantine will to imperial power and a peculiar willingness to take care of (lethal) business up close and personal, if all else fails. Cranston tries to camp up the absurdities of this over-the-top stock character, but to little effect in a movie whose assorted moments of weird humor barely register amid the pseudo-apocalyptic flim-flam.<\/p>\n

Early on, the thing works pretty well as sci-fi action fantasy. But Wiseman and company are much better at taking us into the story\u2019s special world\u2014with its dream implants, artificial memories, identity erasures, Rubik\u2019s Cube architecture, and environmental catastrophes\u2014than they are at getting us to some point at which the journey seems genuinely worthwhile.<\/p>\n

Neither of the Total Recalls really faces up to the element of Dick\u2019s story that links the memory implant\/dream adventure scheme of the future to the motion pictures we already have. And in the case of Wiseman\u2019s film in particular that may leave you feeling that the movie you\u2019ve just watched is just one more example of the sort of thing that Dick was satirizing.