Total Recall

Is there anything less exciting, more boring, than the sixth fistfight in the same movie? If there is, I can’t think of it. It really tempts me to FF through the whole thing. Here’s a movie that begins with a good premise (the second time we have seen Phil Dick’s “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” filmed), and some good action scenes, and quickly degenerates into mindlessness. I am able to swallow hard and accept a tunnel connecting Australia (which looks like Bladerunner to the googol power) and London in seventeen minutes travel time, going almost through the center of the Earth. I am able to accept that only these two places survived a giant chemical war that’s rendered the rest of the planet uninhabitable without a gas mask. I am able to accept a lot more un-survivable stunts than I used to be able to accept … but at some point you just throw up your hands and say “Bullshit!” Now, really, I dig action movies, but this one … well, I think there were two five-minute stretches where no exploding action was taking place, but I could be mistaken. Maybe there was only one, and maybe it was only three minutes. Even by today’s standards, this was one action-packed motherfucker.

What really gnaws at my heart is how good these piece-of-shit brainless mouth-breather movies look these days. Breaks your heart to think about all the artistic creativity and the millions of computer hours spent designing and animating these mind-bendingly complex environments we speed through, with barely a moment to get a look at them. One nice touch: Suspended highways where cars levitate in some sort of magnetic field, not only on top of but below the road. Other than that, you’ve seen it all before.