Movie Review: Gemini Man

Gemini Man ** ½ / *****

Directed by: Ang Lee.

Written by: David Benioff and Billy Ray and Darren Lemke.

Starring: Will Smith (Henry Brogan / Junior), Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Danny Zakarweski), Clive Owen (Clay Verris), Benedict Wong (Baron), Douglas Hodge (Jack Willis), Ralph Brown (Del Patterson), Linda Emond (Janet Lassiter).

 

Ang Lee certainly isn’t the first great director to fall down a technological rabbit hole and not be able to find his way out. Robert Zemeckis spent well over a decade doing those animated films – which I liked for the most part, but he seemed convinced they were the future until they weren’t. James Cameron has become so obsessed with the different technologies, that we’ve only gotten two films from him in the last 20 years – a sad thing from one of the great action directors of his generation. Ang Lee is the one that confuses me the most however. Sure, he’s worked with special effects on and off since Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon nearly 20 years ago – but I wouldn’t have guess that the director of Sense and Sensibility, The Ice Storm, Brokeback Mountain and Lust, Caution would become so obsessed with frame rates and 3-D that it would become the entire reason for his output. Apparently it started because he was frustrated with what he could and couldn’t do working on the Oscar winning Life of Pi – and he wanted more control – hence the experimenting with frame rates that has led to Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk and now Gemini Man. The 120 frames per second is way more than the regular 24 frames of regular film – and allows more information into the frame – and more control of it. It also makes, it must be said, everything look kind of strange. On one level I get it – Lee was a late convert to digital in the first place, but his basic point was a solid one – digital is a different format than film, so why spend all your time trying to make it look like film rather than exploring what it can be. And it is wholly possibly that at some point we’ll look back at these films as groundbreaking – experiments along the way towards something truly new and revolutionary. I just kind of wish Ang Lee would let someone else do the experimenting – and he went back to just making films.

 

If Lee learned something from Billy Lynn’s failure it may well have been he shouldn’t have tried to make a drama – anything with much emotional heft or dramatic moments, but just go straight ahead action movie. Gemini Man is that – an action thriller about a long time government hit man, Henry Brogan (Will Smith) who stumbles upon the information that the last hit he did before retirement wasn’t exactly above board – and so his former bosses come looking for him. Henry, of course, is the greatest soldier America has ever produced though – and he won’t so easily be killed. He ends up on the run with Danny Zakarweski (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), and agent first assigned to watch him (he figures out the ruse, quickly, of course) and eventually his old army buddy Baron (Benedict Wong). Henry’s old bosses, Clay Verris (Clive Owen) meanwhile tries to get permission to unless Gemini on Henry.

 

For a movie that has given away its premise in every preview – and hell, every poster – that the man sent to kill Henry is really his clone – Junior – 25 years younger, played by Smith again with digital de-aging effects – it takes a shocking long time (nearly half the two-hour runtime) to get there in the film. Until then, we do get some action sequences of course – but we also get a lot of tin eared dialogue – delivered by Smith in his “very serious” mode (not the lifeless very serious mode of After Earth – but certainly lacking the charm that made Smith one of the biggest stars in the world). Winstead does what she can – she at least doesn’t seem to be taking anything very seriously, while Owen seems to spend the movie wishing he had a mustache to twirl.

 

I will say this – the de-aged Smith looks good – perhaps not quite “we shot these scenes in the movie 25 years ago Boyhood style and have just been waiting for everyone to age” – but good enough. The problem may be that I’m not quite sure Smith pulls off the performance of the younger version of himself – I think he leans into the naiveté too much, and constantly looks too astonished, and on then on the verge of tears. But hey it works.

 

Shocking, what doesn’t work as much for me is the action scenes themselves – especially everything involving Junior. I’m not quite sure what they did to them, but everything moves too fast – in particular, Junior himself, who almost looks like what they make the Flash or Quiksilver look like in action sequences, and something feels off about them. If you cannot enjoy a scene of a young Will Smith launching a motorcycle at an older Will Smith because something about the picture seems off, you’ve messed up.

 

I guess this is the point to point out that I didn’t see Gemini Man in the format Ang Lee intended – I would have to travel a good 45 minutes each way to find a theater playing Gemini Man in 3-D in the frame rate, so I just saw it at the multiplex five minutes from my house. Watching it projected in regular 2-D digital, you can definitely tell that something is different about this film. Visually, the film can be distracting – even without the super speed action sequences of Junior. But that’s not always a bad thing. There are shots and moments here that don’t quite look like anything else I’ve seen. When I watched Billy Lynn – in IMAX 3-D as Lee intended (I think there were like three of us in the audience) – that film really did look like watching a film with motion smoothing on like a high definition TV – which some critics have complained about this film looking as well. There are moments of that here as well – but they are few and far between. Perhaps projecting it in a format other than intended actually improved the look of this film.

 

There is probably a future for this type of filmmaking – as more and more filmmakers come on board, and experiment. Apparently Cameron is using the same format for the Avatar sequels. And every new technology has their early struggles before the concept is proven, and it starts looking better and better. We probably need to go through those experiments. I just wish it wasn’t Ang Lee doing the experimenting. There are lots of filmmakers who do the experimenting (Michael Bay for example) – but there’s only one Ang Lee – and we haven’t really seen him in a while.