Surrogates
Review: Lachlan Marks
Everybody loves Bruce Willis, so much so that when he jumped from a truck to a jet fighter in Die Hard 4 we all said, “Fuck yeah” instead of, “that’s just preposterous, we’re leaving dear”. Let’s face it, he’s impossible to dislike. He even hangs out with Ashton Kutcher and his twitter-happy ex-wife without being nasty and plays a mean harmonica. Anyway, we haven’t seen Bruce with a big gun since his last turn as John McClane in 2007, so the head-smart futuristic eye-candy-carnage promised by Surrogates seemed like a good idea. Set in a world where people stay at home in cocoons and live out their lives (and fantasies) through robotic copies of themselves, our bald hero plays a detective who encounters the world’s first ever “surrogate” and “owner” instantaneous double kill. You see it’s not meant to be that way, in fact, since these robots became the norm crime rates have plummeted. As humanity as we know it is threatened by the idea of being murdered in their homes (or even worse having to walk to the shops on their pale piano legs), he teams up with the smoking hot Radha Mitchell (not-so-smokin’ in non-mechanical form) and they go about trying to track down the guy with the super-chargey gun that is fucking every body’s microchips up.
Based on a graphic novel, it’s a B-grade Phillip. K Dick style adventure that borrows heavily from the look-what-our-future-could-be-like-if-we-keep-playing-with-technology folklore of Terminator and Minority Report. It’s no surprise then that Director Jonathon Mostow was also responsible for Terminator 3, a film that shares the cheap and nasty vibe of Surrogates despite also having a gigantic budget that could have been used to cure cancer. The plus is that Mostow’s simplistic approach to filmmaking works as pure, stupid entertainment – he doesn’t believe in explaining the world as he goes and instead sums up the entire thing in a five minute opening montage and gets to blowing shit up. The same goes for the plot – there actually isn’t one single subplot. They’re on the run from start to finish and you’ll see sparks flying out of robo-Bruce severed limbs before there’s a chance to question how bad the dialogue is. It’s as fast as it is simple and therefore a very easy way to kill less than and a hour and half. Be thankful that just for once a short story concept isn’t stretched any further than it should be.
