There's a key flaw in the latest sci-fi action thriller SELF/LESS, from which many other problems with the film stem. The launching off point of the plot is that a very rich and very ill man named Damian (nicely underplayed by Ben Kingsley) finds out that there is secret and exceedingly expensive technology available that can take a human mind and place it in a new and younger body, created in a lab. Naturally he pays for the service (from a company run by Matthew Goode's Dr. Albright), and before long his mind is in an artificial body that looks a lot like Ryan Reynolds.
Part of the process of this transplant (called "shedding") is that you have to abandon your previous life entirely, so Damian must never again see his grown daughter ("Downton Abbey's" Michelle Dockery) or his best friend Martin (Victor Garber). Before you shed, you sock away a bunch of money to live off of, and you're off down a path that could lead to immortality or at least a very extended life. Like any other transplant, you have to take a pill, once a day, to avoid rejection. But when Damian forgets to take his, he starts having visions of another life, a soldier's life—a soldier with a wife, Madeline (Natalie Martinez), and young daughter, Anna (Jaynee-Lynne Kinchen).
I don't think I'm ruining anything to tell you that Damian soon discovers that the body his brain is now in is that of a soldier believed killed in Afghanistan, and he sets out to discover exactly who these people are in his vision and why he's seeing things. This naturally does not sit well with Dr. Albright, who has been pumping him full of meds to make sure these memories stay buried. And thus begins Damian's mad chase to get answers, and Albright's pursuit to make sure that doesn't happen. So what starts out as a vaguely promising, if familiar (hello there, John Frankenheimer's SECONDS), science-fiction story becomes fairly standard-issue pursuit film whose outcome is fairly easy to predict.
I tend to like the oddball side of Reynolds. He's a funny guy with loads of charm, but the stranger the role, the more I tend to see what he's truly capable of as an actor. Check him out in the little-seen THE VOICES or the upcoming MISSISSIPPI GRIND. I think there's a very good reason you should be excited about his comic book turn in DEADPOOL (set for early 2016). But SELF/LESS doesn't really seem to be a challenge for him. He's going through the motions and emotions of this confused man, and when he has these visions and is torn about his identity, those are the best moments in the film, but there aren't nearly enough of them.
What's more troubling about SELF/LESS is that it was directed by one of the true visionary filmmakers currently working, Tarsem Singh, whose eye-popping creations for THE CELL and THE FALL are some of my favorites; even his more recent efforts, like Mirror Mirror and Immortals maintain his intense sense of style and spectacle, even if they're basically dumb movies. But there is zero trace of Tarsem in this new movie; it could be anyone behind the camera. It's so patently flat and mainstream that it feels like a death in the family of great filmmakers. And this average sci-fi story, from screenwriters David and Àlex Pastor, needs something to set it apart from the rest. I had assumed Tarsem's cinematic eye would elevate the material; sadly, that isn't the case.
However, that isn't the fatal flaw of which I spoke at the top of this review. The problem lies in believability—not in the science, but in the lead character. It's firmly established that Damian has put business before all else, including his family. An attempt to reconcile with his daughter before his "death" goes horribly wrong, mostly because he tries to throw money at her to heal her age-old wounds. What I had trouble with was Damian caring that the body he was in belonged to a real person, rather than it being something that was manufactured in a lab. It might have disturbed him, but he was obsessed enough with keeping his mind alive to go through this process that I never bought that he would seek out the family he was seeing in his brain to possibly give them back the man they lost. I spent a great deal of SELF/LESS thinking, "Yeah, but he wouldn't do that."
This has nothing to do with thinking that all rich people are selfish with their money and their feelings about others, but if you're going to have us believe someone would twist their entire world around to stay alive longer, don't then try to convince us that this same person would throw that all away over something like this. Yes, this is meant to be a story about redemption, but I think there might have been other ways to tackle that without going to these extremes. But I'll clue you into a little secret: even if that weren't an issue, the movie isn't particularly strong no matter how man genres you try to squeeze it into, and I left feeling more "less" than "self."
