{"id":7906,"date":"2019-10-10T11:46:32","date_gmt":"2019-10-10T15:46:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/?p=7906"},"modified":"2019-10-10T11:49:27","modified_gmt":"2019-10-10T15:49:27","slug":"review-gemini-man","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/?p=7906","title":{"rendered":"Review: GEMINI MAN"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

High frame rate feature undercut by subpar writing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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Director Ang Lee\u2019s success has in part been in blending cutting-edge filmmaking techniques with well-written narratives. The best of his hybrids include 2012\u2019s wonderful \u201cLife of Pi,\u201d for which he won the Oscar for best director, and 2001\u2019s \u201cCrouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,\u201d which netted four Oscars including best foreign language film. Lee is a mega-talented guy. That\u2019s why the derivative and frankly laughable \u201cGemini Man\u201d is so surprising. Given the lackluster response to his last feature, \u201cBilly Lynn\u2019s Long Halftime Walk,\u201d is it time to declare that the once lauded master is in decline? I sincerely hope not.

It\u2019s almost not worth a paragraph to introduce the story told by three screenwriters in \u201cGemini Man.\u201d But as a means of providing a measure of context here\u2019s what you need to know: Will Smith plays a 51 year-old government sniper named Henry Brogan. We meet him in the film\u2019s opening sequence where he calmly takes out, from a great distance, a terrorist on a speeding train. There\u2019s no one better with a rifle, and given his age, his superiors have begun to worry about the void left when he retires. And retire he does, but not before learning some disturbing top secret information about his last mark. To close the loop, his boss Janet Lassiter (Linda Emond) and a shadowy military figure named Clay Verris (Clive Owen) decide to take Henry out. Naturally, Henry is hard to kill, and he escapes, leaving a stack of bodies and taking with him another agent named Danny Zaharweski (Mary Elizabeth Winstead). The worldwide chase is on.

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The young Smith does look convincing.<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Okay, we\u2019ve seen this kind of film too many times to count. But Ang Lee has what he hopes is an ace up his sleeve: de-aging animation techniques that will pit the present old Will Smith against a younger, faster, more-deadly version of himself. And due to an incessant advertising campaign, with featurettes devoted to the technology, most viewers will not be surprised by the appearance of a 23 year-old Smith. And once that little secret is out, there\u2019s really not much to recommend here.

Sure, there\u2019s one decent action sequence in which the Smiths race through the streets of Budapest on motorcycles. And once the older man is kicked off his bike, the younger copy uses his bike to attack his original with a mixed bag success. It\u2019s entertaining as far as that goes, but surrounding this well-paced and mounted sequence is a clunky and unintentionally funny story that\u2019s laced with false sentiment. Co-screenwriter Billy Ray, man, you\u2019ve got to be kidding me! Three writers were apparently not enough to deliver a coherent film.

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Will Smith and Mary Elizabeth Winstead should be in a better movie.<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

But it\u2019s the effects that matter, right? Apparently trusting his writing team with the story, Lee must have focused almost entirely on capturing the images. And that hard work is all wasted, because it is doubtful that \u201cGemini Man\u201d will ever be widely projected in the intended format of 4K resolution at 120 frames per second in 3D. I can tell you that seeing the movie in 2D, 24 frames was disappointing, regardless of the problematic script. Maybe it was the projection, but the image I saw was a bit desaturated and light blue, as though I watched the film from the side of a LED home television. This may have to do with the effects and original format, but it was off-putting to me. It also gave the film blah visuals, where a gritty look might have conveyed a better mood (see the crunchy look of the \u201cJohn Wick\u201d films, for example).

Poorly written and conceived, Ang Lee is a filmmaker with all the toys but nowhere to show off all his great technical expertise.

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Ang Lee delivers a failure of form over of substance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[1777,1776,1775,999,1779,1778,1500],"class_list":["post-7906","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-120fps","tag-4k","tag-ang-lee","tag-animation","tag-cgi","tag-technology","tag-will-smith","no-thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7906","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7906"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7906\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7912,"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7906\/revisions\/7912"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7906"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7906"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7906"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}