In "Gemini Man," we are faced with a bizarre two-faced situation: the first is the technology promoted by the film, and the second is its hero, American star Will Smith. The technical aspect is the focus of the film and we see the use of special effects to minimize the hero of the film, and the idea of using the form of the actor 30 years ago, and the installation of his face at that time on his face today.
The result is serious, meaning that any actor over the age of 60 or even 70 can perform younger characters. This is not the first film to use this technique. It was preceded by Terminator in 2009 and 2015 when he used an old image of Arnold Schwarzenegger to show his character as it appeared in the 1980s and Captain America: a civil war. Deniro in the film «Irish», which is scheduled to be released in «Netflix» early next month.
This means that Hollywood may begin a new era in the next decade by re-launching successful films with the actors themselves after minimizing them, updating special effects, and making some changes to the artistic visions to ensure the popularity of the audience instead of hiring new actors. In other words, Hollywood will seek to employ the visual trick in place of reality. The second face is Smith, who has become the enemy of himself. After the stardom emerged in the early nineties, the actor began to witness the painful decline of the beginning of this decade because of his disastrous decisions in choosing his roles, and we return to this point later.
Henry Brogan (Smith) is a wage killer for the US government and is looking to retire after his last assignment - the assassination of an unidentified figure on a high-speed train. Performs the task and retires.
Henry meets a girl named Danny (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) who works in boat rental, and meets an old friend named Yuri (Elia Volok) who tells him that the target on the train was not a terrorist but an innocent man who later became clear that he was a scientist in the secret Jiminay project. He left the project responsible for killing him.
When the agency learned that Henry had discovered the secret, Clay Owen, the chief of covert operations, decided to kill him in an unthinkable way: to send a hired killer, a replica of Henry himself, made from his body using his genetic mark, since Clay had been in a laboratory for 25 years and raised him. As his son, he named him Junior, his little one, trained him to fight and tasked him to kill his older version, and this is Jiminay's secret project.
Taiwan director Ang Lee (Oscar-winning Crouching Tiger and Hidden Dragon directed the best foreign film in 2000, and Oscar won the best director for Hay Bai in 2012) seems obsessed with technology at the expense of all the elements of the film. Lee filmed the film at 120 fps, the same as that used in his previous film Billy Linz Long Half Time Walk in 2016.It was the first film to employ but was not convincing and failed at the box office.
Lee, apparently not convinced of that failure, decided to re-employ her in Action, with the same result: visual fascination and emotional emptiness. We return to Smith, who started getting lost in 2013 when he insisted on Sony to release the unwanted M Night Shaimlan at the time, after Earth. The same director, David Eyre, who did not see the light of cinema because of the acquisition of «Netflix» it.
Here, Smith does not seem to be convinced of the role and appeared to perform a boring unconvincing, this for the character of Henry, while his version of Junior was in some scenes closer to the hologram than to the real. Nstead merely supplemented the number and the reason for her only existence as a woman to bring the balance Hollywood wants between the sexes in her films, and logic says nobody overwhelms Smith's stardom in his films.
Action scenes are poorly designed and quick to execute, often shot up close because Smith is over 50 years old, and often not trained enough to play a combat role. This film is distracted by three ideas, each of which can be a film in itself.
The first idea of a paid assassin discovers the existence of a copy of it. The second version of the killer is trying to get rid of control and independence by its decision. Third, copies of the murderer invade the city and are not affected by bullets and fire. The three ideas exist but are incomplete in the film.
The film first appeared in 1997 and passed on several directors, including the late Tony Scott and Curtis Hanson, as well as actors including Harrison Ford and Sean Connery before the script reached Smith.
A point to consider: Since the idea has been around for 22 years, almost the age of a Junior character, wouldn't it be better to shoot Junior scenes whether Smith or otherwise at the time and then add the actor's scenes right now with the technology required to implement them? If this decision were made then we would have had the strangest action film of the year, and we would have succeeded because of that decision instead of employing a unique technique / idea in an unhappy scenario set to serve the idea only.
Will Smith is young for this role and inevitably Harrison Ford or any actor over the age of 70 will be more convincing. The perplexing question: If the idea of the film was from the 1990s, why did not its up-to-date dialogues fit into this time? Was it necessary for Henry to say that he could not look in the mirror at the beginning of a film about a replica of the hero and then get rid of the feeling of the end of the problem / film? It's lazy writing in its strongest form.
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If the idea of the film from the nineties, why did not update his debates to fit this time?
Will Smith is young for this role, and inevitably Harrison Ford or any actor over 70 will be more convincing.