This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Aug. 2, 2012 - "Total Recall" is so much like a video game it made my thumbs ache.
This new Sci-Fi action movie, a dreary remake of a 1990 Arnold Schwarzenegger muscle fest and a distant relative of a 1966 story by Philip K. Dick, is basically one long and complicated chase sequence.
From time to time, the crunching, computer-generated rapid-fire action is interrupted by a dramatic interlude involving hero Colin Farrell trying to keep a straight face while trading lame dialogue with Kate Beckinsale.
She happens to be married to the film's director, Len Wiseman. Beckinsale and Wiseman have previously collaborated on the four "Underworld" movies. Of the first one, Roger Ebert memorably wrote, "This is a movie so paltry in its characters and shallow in its story that the war seems to exist primarily to provide graphic visuals."
He could have been describing "Total Recall," which similarly lacks engaging characters or compelling story and also features a war, this one in the distant and dreadful future. The war involves, in a confusing way, what is left of Great Britain and what is left of Australia on an otherwise barren Earth. Mars, which featured prominently in the Dick story and the Schwarzenegger movie, does not make an appearance.
Farrell plays Douglas Quaid, a disgruntled assembly line worker with a lousy job but a beautiful wife (Beckinsale). They live in a post-apocalyptic world of cadaverous ruined skyscrapers and crumbling slums patrolled by genetically engineered storm troopers. These white-plastic encased thugs look remarkably like their counterparts in "Star Wars," and are equally bad shots with their ever-sputtering automatic rifles.
In the setup to the story, Quaid, bored with his life, takes a stroll down sleazy street and ends up at Rekall, an establishment that promises to inject its patrons' brains with artificially induced adventures and memories that are a lot more fun than the drudgery of their everyday lives. Quaid chooses to become, in his mind, a secret agent, and he is all wired up and ready for some serious 007 mind tripping when everything goes awry.
Sparks fly, he is yanked from the chair and he finds himself declared public enemy number one, with multitudes of storm troopers chasing him across some admittedly remarkable computer-spun cityscapes. He discovers that he is not Douglas Quaid at all, he is actually a world-renowned superspy -- or is that only in his mind?
The chase is on, and it doesn't really let up for almost two hours. We are never sure what is real and what is Rekall, which makes it difficult to care what happens to the character as he fights his way through a veritable demolition derby of explosive silicon-carved special effects.
Despite all the destruction and apparent killing, the movie's MPAA rating is PG-13, which means that most of the suffering is done by machines and "synthetic" storm troopers, with very little blood spilled. The protagonists -- at one point, a revolutionary played by Jessica Biel replaces Beckinsale at Farrell's side -- are capable of superhuman feats and seem impervious to the thousands of rounds of bullets fired by the dimwitted storm troopers.
Out of the whole undistinguished mess, there is one memorable scene -- a gunfight in zero gravity in a vehicle that apparently is plunging at great speed through the center of the earth. That scene lasts, at the most, five minutes. As for the rest of the movie, I'm told that the "Total Recall" game is already available online for $1.99.
Opens Friday Aug. 3