Gemini Man
My god, the CGI face is so bad! Smack in the middle of the uncanny valley. Mixing it up with real actors of the calibre of Will Smith and Mary Elizabeth Winstead only makes it more cartoonish, but not in a good way like Who Framed Roger Rabbit?.
The film alternates very strangely between somewhat grounded actions scenes, full on gravity defying stunts, and John Wick ripoffs. The motorcycle chase starts as Bourne, but morphs into something closer to a superhero film. Towards the end they go further and further towards Terminator.
Another weirdness is that Mary Elizabeth Winsted dresses like a child (it’s only missing pigtails), but she is only 15 years younger than Will Smith. Their romantic relationship is treated like a crime only to be spoken in hush tones, but it’s not like she could be his child.
The big disappointment is really the CGI face. It just doesn’t work. Totally kills the poignant scene in the catacombs, with such inspired script and delivery, but the image is a cartoon young Will Smith attempting what hu-mans call emotions. Either go full CGI everywhere, have a real lookalike which can act, or have the actor pull double duty with over the shoulder shots, like this is usually done. Or not, just go for the avant-garde and have two actors that don’t look alike, who gives a shit.
Pull a Back to the Future, I bet Zemeckis is pissed that Beowulf and The Polar Express were panned. He was right on Back to the Future, it’s better than all other CGI crap.
This was funded with Chinese money (AliBaba and Fosun, which means I personally contributed twice!), laundered through Jerry Bruckheimer. Sometimes it seems they are intent of sabotaging Hollywood by funding these kinds of dross to drown out the art, but it’s easier to suggest pure greed as the main driver. Clean as a whistle, no “wokeness” that might affect Chinese Middle Class Viewer money.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.