Total Recall (2012)

The new Total Recall opened today. The thing of it is – that this film isn’t at all memorable. I found myself thinking of other films that this one brought to mind. Though this film has the same title and the same source material, a Philip K. Dick short story, this is not a remake. Meaning they say it isn’t a remake. But when I recalled the original Total Recall, from 1990, which starred Ah-nuld, Sharon Stone, Rachel Ticotin, and Ronnie Cox as Douglas Quaid, Melina, Lori, and Cohaagen – I found that the lead four characters in this one have the same names.

Here, Douglas Quaid is played by Colin Farrell, Melina is played by Jessica Biel, Lori is performed by Kate Beckinsale, and Cohaagen is played by Bryan Cranston. We don’t learn much about any of them including Farrell’s Quaid. The story begins after a short crawl which tells us that Earth has been ravaged by chemical warfare, and there are only two places capable of sustaining life. One being the United Federation of Britain, and the other is called The Colony – but on the global map that we are shown, The Colony is Australia.

Life is nothing special on the Colony. In fact it bears a distinct resemblance to the futuristic world that we saw in Blade Runner. Neon, rain, umbrellas, and other Asian influences. Many who live on the Colony, work in the Federation and they are able to commute to work. Right – not by traveling up to space and then back in a fast quarter orbit – but by traveling via high-speed transportation vehicles which make the trip through a tunnel in the earth’s core. The trip includes super high speeds and even a portion of it has zero gravity – but takes so little time that people can make the commute twice a day.

Farrell/Quaid works on an assembly line in a factory where synthetic police are assembled. These look like a cross between the robots in I Robot, and the troopers in Star Wars. They have the fluidity of motion that a human would have, and the disposibility of the robots. However, it must be noted that the implied menace is only implied. They’re incapable of rising anywhere above the level of total ineffectiveness.

The film opens in the midst of Quaid having a nightmare, and he’s unhappy enough in his life, to try out Rekall, a place where artificial memories are created according to your desires, and implanted into your memory. Only with Quaid’s visit, something goes horribly wrong, and he has to flee for his life after a shoot out with the synthetic police. Quaid’s selection at Rekall was that of a secret agent.

Needless to say, the rest of the film has him trying to figure out what is real, what is a dream, and who he really is. “If I’m not me, then who am I?”

Horrible Bosses

It’s often crude and it’s often lewd. They talk about things in the film that you wouldn’t discuss at your family dinner table. Stuff happens and things are said in this movie that magazine  and newspaper movie columnists can’t describe on their pages, or TV film critics are unable to repeat during an on-the-air broadcast review. This film is an equal opportunity abuser – fat people, blacks, gays, dentists, even the cops all come off looking bad or are served up as a part of a joke or a reference in the film. On top of all that – and despite all that I’ve just told you about the film, Horrible Bosses is hilarious.

Let’s set up the opponents:

Jason Bateman is Nick Hendricks. He’s been at this firm for 8 years. He works for Kevin Spacey who plays Dave Harken. Harken trots around in pin striped vested suits, gold power ties, and his ego and power know no boundaries. As he says to Nick, ‘I own you. You’re my bitch. I can crush you any time I want.’

While Bateman does Bateman which isn’t new, he’s quite good as the moral center who tries to keep a tight reign on his more excitable partners, but he’s also a person who can’t escape his current job dilemma. Harken has promised to trash him unmercifully if asked for a reference. Spacey on the other hand hasn’t been this deliciously hateful since he played Mel Profitt to Ken Wahl’s Vinnie Terranova in the TV series Wiseguy.

Charlie Day plays Dale Arbus. He’s a dental technician, he’s happily engaged, law enforcement has hung an unfair label on him, and most of the time at work – he has to fend off his boss Dr. Julia Harris, D.D.S. – a sexually voracious man-eater both literally, and figuratively.

Dale, you know I like to fool around ...

In this role we have Jennifer Anniston, who simply aces this role which crossed into uncharted territories for her as an actress. She’s hot for Charlie, or any male with working apparatus, and for Charley, simply being in the same room with her is nearly a compromising situation.

I'm in ... Let's kill the bitch !

Jason Sudeikis appears as Kurt, the last of the belabored trio of guys who hate their bosses. He’a decent guy, good at his job as the firm accountant – his weakness is that he has an eye for the members of our population who wear skirts. Kurt works for the Pellitt Chemical Company headed up by Donald Sutherland, who is a sweetheart of a boss in his brief cameo. But Sutherland punches out rather early and definitely unexpectedly, and the company is taken over by his slacker/playboy/druggie son Bobby Pellitt who’s role is played by Colin Farrell. Farrell is almost unrecognizable (with his elaborate comb-over ‘do’) and he doesn’t get a lot of screen time. On his first day as the new Company president he orders Kurt to trim the fat on the payroll – by firing all the fat people. He’s a real tool. He’s also called an asshole.

First, she's sucking on a popsicle, then a banana, and finally a hot dog ...

There’s your opponents for this film-ic scrimmage. Our three mice, umm,  heroes – meet for drinks and somehow they hatch an idea to kill their bosses, or more accurately, they decide to hire someone to do it for them. A google search leads them to some-one who uses the term wet-work in his ad. Dale says this is a code word for blood will flow, and is used in the assassination trade.

But it turns out, that this some-one is not exactly what the boys wanted either, so cue up Jamie Foxx’s entrance. While Foxx as Dean ‘MF’ Jones (take a wild guess as what the MF stands for) portrays an outwardly unsavory ex-con – he’s not the one to do the “wet-work” either. But he strikes a deal with our boys.

Cash changes hands and the fun begins.

And I mean that. Our boys are neither killers, nor are they even close to being capable of doing the deeds. Scripted by a trio of screenwriters that sounds more like an LA law firm – Markowitz, Daley, & Goldschimdt and directed by Seth Gordon – this is really a funny movie. It has all the hallmarks of a frat-boy joke fest with its dependence on some light slapstick humor, with some often puerile and scatological references, and abundant sexual references that are smartly  crossed with some old and iconic Alfred Hitchcock movie murder strategies.

What if ... ?

Factor in superb performances by Anniston and Spacey, and I think you’re going to have a hit on your hands, because with certainty I can report that it all works. It may not be sophisticated or clever but  I lost track of the number of times I LOL’ed (that’s laughed out loud). Once the word-of-mouth gets out – and the Transformer crowd (read younger) and the Larry Crowne crowd (read older) search for follow up films to see – it’s going to be this one.

The Good Guys

I’m done with school, I’m out in the world with a good many of those items that we chase after and desire, now either in my possession, or they’ve become forgotten dreams, or, they are current items on my credit card statement. There’s a lot of truth to the expression, ‘been there, done that’ — and while it is not my mantra, it does fit comfortably.

But it wasn’t that long ago that hanging out in a tree fort, hikes in the forest with the dog, and Saturday afternoon at the movies were very important to me. And in those days, when it was summer, and there was no school, we’d play cowboys and Indians, cops and robbers, or G I Joe. It was fun to be a good guy. You could be heroic, brave, never run of make-believe ammo, and it was exciting to emulate heroes.

Growing up on Long Island, in a North Shore commuter town about forty miles east of Manhattan, we watched TV, played baseball, and absorbed as many movies as possible. And we loved those movie heroes. And today is no different … I still love my movie heroes.

Sorry, we won’t be talking about iconic cinema heroes like Indiana Jones, James Bond, Rocky Balboa, and Han Solo. We’ll leave them on the shelf for now. For me, so many of the cinematic good guys are cops. I’m not talking about the guys in uniforms that walk a beat, or handle crowd control or traffic. While exemplary, it is not the uniformed police that we will discuss here.

It’s the cool guys with gold shields — the detectives.