Substitute boredom for marginal excitement!

Surrogates

It's probably not wildly apropos to make my first real post a discussion about a film that is neither a classic nor current release, but it's what the wife and I watched last night, so it is what sits on my mind. Initially we did try to watch The Awful Truth starring Cary Grant, but it turns out that he did in fact star in a few flicks that were pretty forgettable, this being the foremost example of that.

It's the beauty of having Netflix attached to our Wii; you can stream so much content and if you're bored with it, just stop. I've been living in a content-saturated dream for the past two weeks. Surrogates happened to be available for download, and since it had Bruce Willis and robots, both the wife and I were satisfied to give it a try.

The film is based on a graphic novel of the same name. The plot goes a little something like this: in the not too distant future, people can leave their flesh bodies on a table at home and control a sleeker, sexier robot version of themselves out on the town. The robot suffers all the risks associated with leaving your house and have become ubiquitous in society. Inexplicably, crime becomes almost unheard of, as well as disease and inhibition as the streets fill up with replaceable custom robot bodies, controlled by their human masters safely from home. People who can't get with the times relegate themselves to human-only ghettos, from whence they plot revenge against the robot takeover. The movie doesn't really explain why.

Everything is fine until a pair of lecherous robots come face to face with one of these humans, who has an interesting weapon. Not only does it fry the robot he uses it on, but it also kills the human who controls the robot remotely. Bruce Willis heads up the FBI team that investigates this crime, which ultimately threatens the whole surrogate way of life.

The plot was specious enough to have the wife and I skeptical from the outset (wife asked me several times "Why is crime almost zero?" and "You'd think with a robot body you'd do all kinds of crazy stuff and wouldn't care about consequences!" and most often "Did I miss something important here while I wasn't paying attention?") but the action plugs along at a pretty good clip and we as viewers stopped asking as many questions as more attention developed around the murder mystery.

Sadly, the film can't maintain that plot much either. I have to admit, I haven't read the graphic novel, so I don't know if they're working with the story as given, or if they've made some changes which made the storyline in the film flow more smoothly but make less sense.

The villain in the film (James Cromwell) uses robots to be everywhere at once, but nobody seems to consider it odd that he can maintain so many robots - especially robots infiltrating the human-only ghettos - without being discovered. Cromwell's motivation for villainy? He was fired by his own robot company, and they started marketing robots in a way that Cromwell didn't like, even though he uses them throughout the film in exactly that same manner. His son is the first victim of our mystery weapon, but we can't really attribute his death to the plotting of his father, since he had apparently already gone to great lengths to plot the downfall of robot-people before his son's tragic death came into the picture.

Furthermore - the weapon was developed by (dun dun dun!) the same company that makes the robots, and they made it for (dun dun DUN!) the military, which initially pretended to know nothing about it. Inexplicably, Bruce Willis' boss at the FBI is somehow involved in the murders and cover up, though nobody ever stops to ask why anyone would bother to involve him in the plotting in the first place. Bruce Willis finally defeats the villains and stops the world from being destroyed with the ticking clock reading 0:02 or somesuch nonsense.

What we're left with is a film that has an interesting but flawed premise that goes to a formulaic conclusion in the span of 89 minutes. It wasn't bad by any real stretch - technically, it does everything it needs to, the acting was serviceable, the direction okay. The film was just too generic to be memorable, which is sad considering how exotic its premise was.

Side note - I know it's not fair, but seeing James Cromwell on the screen after his role in L.A. Confidential - I just knew he was the villain from the moment I saw him. He does evil well, but I think I need to see him in some other good roles to banish my typecasting bias.