Gemini Man
“Gemini Man” feels like a movie, and concept, that should have been made in the ’90s era of high-concept blockbusters, and indeed, producer Jerry Bruckheimer has had the screenplay since 1997, and it has languished before he could get Skydance Media to purchase the rights, and brought on Ang Lee to direct. What took so long? We’ve come a long way in visual effects since then, and performance capture, and de-aging CGI, is now able to allow whomever plays the role of Henry Brogan to also play a younger version of himself without looking absurd. That isn’t to say the movie, itself, is not absurd; the execution just isn’t as silly as it would have been 20 years ago.
Will Smith is the actor tasked with playing Brogan, a lethal assassin whom is finally ready to hang it up as the body count begins to take a moral toll on him. We first meet him as he is performing a long-distance hit on a bullet train in Europe, and the way Lee and cinematographer Dion Beebe use framing and shot composition in this sequence makes me curious to see the film in its intended HFR 3D process (which most are only showing at 60 FPS, as only 14 theatres in America are equipped for the original 120 FPS it was shot at); I only saw the film in 2D. As he begins to settle into retirement, however, wouldn’t you know it that there’s something not quite right about that last kill- the one on the bullet train- and he wasn’t told everything about it. Now, the government agency that employed him wants to kill him, and an agent that was brought in to keep tabs on him (Danny, played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead) ends up on the run with him while an old acquaintance, Clay Varris (Clive Owen)- who’s now head of a secretive Black Ops company called GEMINI- dispatches his best assassin, a 24-year-old clone of Henry, to take Henry out.
I’m not going to lie- I really enjoyed this film. I’m a fan of 1990s Jerry Bruckheimer’s stripped down action thrillers, and one of my favorites was the 1998 high-tech spy thriller he did with Tony Scott, “Enemy of the State,” which he got Smith to star in after his breakout success. This reminded me a lot of that in the way the screenplay by David Benioff, Billy Ray and Darren Lemke goes about its slick, silly business, and gives Smith a lot of latitude to let his charms come trough; this might be my favorite Will Smith action vehicle in a good long while, in fact. Ang Lee’s career is fascinating to me; the acclaimed director of “Sense and Sensibility,” “The Ice Storm” and “Brokeback Mountain” is scratching the escapist itch once again after “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” and 2003’s “Hulk,” and the way he really leans in to action filmmaking, and understands how staging action sequences work is always intriguing to watch. Some of the choices, like the way the motorcycle chase Henry has with his younger self ends, are not ideal (that sequence kind of peters out), but the final shootout at GEMINI, as well as a mano a mano hand-to-hand sequence between the two Henrys, are well constructed and exciting to watch unfold. This time, he brings 3D into the fold, and again, I saw it in 2D, but I was impressed enough with his use of it in “Life of Pi” that I’m intrigued by how he might choose to shoot a film like this in 3D. Who knew Lee and Bruckheimer would ever come together in 1995?
The big sell of “Gemini Man,” however, is less the action than the concept of Will Smith vs. Will Smith using the same de-aging process Marvel has been working with since 2015, and an actor interacting with themselves in a way that doesn’t look ridiculous. The film pulls it off quite well, and Smith is game for it, but more than that, the script actually has some interesting beats about aging, what it means to take a life, and what the best type of person to do that job is, exactly. No, it’s not exactly sobering psychological drama, but it’s something that clearly means something for Lee and Smith to explore in this film, and it has a grounding effect when the film gets kind of loopy and obvious, as only 1990s blockbusters were capable of. It’s a fun little throwback to that I’m glad we got this year, at a time where franchise is king.
