Surrogates

Once a year or so, the moviegoing public gets a truly excellent sci-fi picture, like Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006) or Danny Boyle’s Sunshine (2007). However, what usually gets pawned off as science fiction is hoary, effects-heavy space opera or the occasional rickety Philip K. Dick adaptation.

Unfortunately for everyone involved, Jonathan Mostow’s Surrogates falls firmly into the latter category. It’s a movie that’s very much in the Dick vein—with its conspiracy theories and concerns over the nature of identity—but with all the paranoia stripped away. And being that the film is an attempt at vaguely hard-boiled detective fiction, the whole thing comes across as warmed over Blade Runner (1982). In other ways—such as the film’s concerns with society’s increasing technological disconnect—it resembles Neveldine/Taylor’s recent Gamer, except minus that movie’s trashy cinematic inventiveness.

What we get with Surrogates is a futuristic society that has humanity living their lives through robots. Basically, people stay home, controlling their “surrogate” from a computer their brain is plugged into. The beauty of all this is that you can be and look like whomever you want. What this ultimately means is that the film features a lot of pretty people and Bruce Willis in a blond wig that looks like either Elton John’s last hair transplant (the one that worked) or something from Nicolas Cage’s summer collection.

Other than appearance, the appeal of surrogacy is safety—a robot can be hit by a car and the person in control on the other end is fine. That is, until the day some surrogates are killed by a mysterious weapon that also manages to kill their users, too, something that could put a crimp in the surrogacy business and render the whole point of it moot.

It’s up to a lone detective (Willis, doing his usual gruff tough-guy shtick) to get to the bottom of it all. And of course, it’s a mystery that goes deeper than anyone could have imagined, involving the leader of the anti-surrogacy movement (Ving Rhames in a dreadlock wig) and the creator of surrogacy (James Cromwell) himself. The only problem is that the revelations are never shocking or surprising. In fact, most of the movie never makes any sense. I’ll be the last to complain about a film only running 89 minutes, but director Mostow (Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines) mistakes a quick pace for a jumble of uninvolving plot points.

There’s some action thrown in to jazz things up, but none of it is particularly exciting: lots and lots of chase scenes, going back and forth from adequate to laughable (I dare anyone not to get a laugh out of the accumulation of robot bodies on the hood of Bruce Willis’ car as he drives up a sidewalk). While Surrogates gets points for at least painting itself as a return to a more intelligent type of science fiction, it offers little else. The film has neither originality nor panache going for it. Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of violence, disturbing images, language, sexuality and a drug-related scene.