Review: "Total Recall"

If you thought Total Recall (1990) needed updated effects and an abundance of overly long action scenes, then you will absolutely love Total Recall (2012), my friend. LOVE it.

Douglas Quaid (Colin Farrell) is a factory worker who travels through the planet's core everyday to a dead end job at the other end of a post-apocalyptic world. Even though he returns home each night to his beautiful wife, Lori (Kate Beckinsale), the feeling that he was meant for more gnaws at him constantly. He decides to visit Rekall, a company that specializes in memory implants, for a better-than-life dream vacation, but the experience goes awry, and Quaid becomes a wanted man -- unable to trust anyone, even his own memories. On the run from both the police and his wife, he is aided by Melina (Jessica Biel), a resistance fighter who may be the key to discovering who he really is.

Len Wiseman, who directed the first two Underworld movies and Live Free or Die Hard, takes the helm for this remake of Paul Verhovan's 1990 film, which starred Arnold Schwarzenegger. Wiseman is  a nuts-and-bolts action director with a dark and gritty visual sense and a fairly straightforward shooting style that is free from heavy reliance on shakey camerawork. That's a plus, but while the action scenes are confident, they are often overly long. During one particular scene that involved a fight sequence where the characters are jumping between a series of elevators moving in every direction, my mind wandered, and I couldn't stop thinking, "where could all these elevators possibly be going?"

The story, inspired by Philip K. Dick's "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale," has tons of potential to be mind-bending and keep the audience guessing, but instead, the film settles for being just a propulsive action flick. There's nothing wrong with good action-for-action's-sake filmmaking (see The Raid: Redemption), but you don't need Dick's story to do that. Go write your own futuristic secret agent movie and leave the intellectual science fiction to filmmakers who are interested in telling those stories. The fact that Wiseman references Blade Runner (another, better Philip K. Dick adaptation) throughout the film, only makes me wonder how he could be such a big fan of that film and never learn anything from watching it.

In the end, Total Recall (2012) is not as guilty of being a bad movie as it is of being a missed opportunity, a waste of good material. I wouldn't begrudge anyone for enjoying the film for its slick visuals and nonstop action, or for Kate Beckinsale's now-textbook female terminator performance, but I can't wholly recommend it because it takes a smart premise with interesting ideas and ignores them, while the actors chase each other around and around and around.

"Setting the Frame" Film Grade = C-