Your horoscope should tell you this isn’t a good one
Will Smith and Ang Lee have joined forces because, well, it was their turn to do so. Why they teamed up for the misfire that it Gemini Man however, is anyone’s guess. Much has been made about the movie’s past and how the project served plenty of time in development hell as a number of high-profile actors and filmmakers attached themselves to it before eventually dropping out. In the meantime, the script itself went through a number of variations (as is typically the case) landing on a final version and a trio of credited writers, including Billy Ray. After all this, one would be expecting the end result to be a disaster of epic proportions which everyone involved would never be able to live down and audiences would take great pleasure in making fun of. But Gemini Man isn’t a bad movie; it’s just a boring one.
In Gemini Man, top assassin Henry Brogan (Smith) has spent most of his adult like taking out hits for a secret government agency, earning a name and a reputation for himself in the process. However when his latest assignment almost goes wrong, the 51-year-old decides that maybe it’s time to retire. His agency has other plans for him due to issues relating to his final assassination and have put a hit out on Henry himself. After recruiting fellow agent Danny Zakarweski (Mary-Elizabeth Winstead), Henry goes on a globe-trotting mission to stay alive as an assassin, sent by agency head Clay Verris (Clive Owen), looks to take him out. As he tries to stay alive, Henry is shocked to discover that his assassin is actually a manufactured clone of his younger self.
A few kinks aside, Gemini Man actually works for most of its first third. The movie is built up as the kind of nostalgic man on the run tale with the hunter becoming the hunted, delivering the kind of pleasurable action thrills a movie like this knows will please fans. Henry’s story, that of the recently-retired ghost-like killer who finds out he’s now a marked man, has been done a number of times. Still, there’s something so involving on both an action and emotional level about watching someone who has devoted his life to such darkness now being forced to essentially confront his past. It helps that Lee knows what a movie such as Gemini Man deserves from a structural standpoint. The movie’s architecture feels solidly tight and never really ever drags even when it does engage in a “quiet” moment here and there. The pacing reflects this perfectly as the filmmakers take both their protagonist and their audience on one globetrotting adventure after another, making sure the latter never gets overwhelmed in the midst of everything taking place. It’s so rare that an action movie can come along which both forces its central character to run for his life and reflect on the journey which got him to that point. Gemini Man manages such a feat almost seamlessly; for at least part of the time.
While the first third of Gemini Man is building up to it’s main “reveal” (you know, the one the whole movie’s marketing is centered around), it’s actually the introduction of the supposed twist where things begin to go wrong. Almost as soon as Henry encounters his younger clone, the movie almost becomes lost. Aside from the fact that it takes the seemingly intelligent Henry a long time to actually realize he’s been cloned, the script doesn’t seem to know what to do with either version of it’s main character, including and especially being able to give the cloned Henry a name more interesting than Junior. What’s even more baffling is the fact that they try and paint Junior as a machine, but then decide to give him more emotions than his older counterpart once he learns of his true origins. It’s obvious that the movie is trying to speak the image of assassins being looked at nothing more as killing machines by their handlers who don’t consider them actual people, but rather disposable entities. While it’s an idea worth exploring, it’s one which is handled better and more thoroughly in the first act when it was somewhat under the surface. It’s when the ideology is so bluntly and loudly handled in an attempt to visualize its ideas where Gemini Man stumbles.
It wouldn’t be unkind to say that with this role, Smith may actually be saying to Hollywood and the general public that he can kick just as much a** in his 50s as he could in his 20s. Thankfully though, he does bring enough layers to both of his roles he’s assigned with undertaking, making each feel individual enough insofar as the script allows. The same can’t be said for the rest of the cast who suffer as a result of the half-baked characters they’ve been given. Winstead is game, but her creators have made the mistake of giving her virtually every single female operative cliche in the movie handbook and little else. Benedict Wong is wasted in the former assassin/”BFF with a cool villa you can hide out in” role, while Owen does absolutely nothing with his threadbare villain, making you wonder why he even said yes to the project.
Plenty were expecting Gemini Man to be the dumpster fire of the year; the movie you could beat up on with the A-list star and acclaimed director who were likewise ripe for tearing apart. The truth is, aside from a couple of scenes which could have been played out in a “movie within a movie” scenario, as well as an ending that should have been a blu-ray extra at best, Gemini Man is just…dull. Its aims are certainly realistic and its intent is pure enough. Yet the script’s originality of the past and its melding with the technology of today seems like a mismatched blind date that never gets better despite its promising start. It would have been impossible (or at least incredibly difficult) to make Gemini Man when it was first conceived because it needed the film advances of today’s day and age. However if this is the execution, maybe the project remains one which was always meant to be lost in the recesses of time.