It News: Colin Farrell and Jessica Biel struggle with the past, as well as the present script, in ‘Total Recall’

August 3, 2012

Colin Farrell and Jessica Biel struggle with the past, as well as the present script, in ‘Total Recall’

Remake of Arnold Schwarezenegger film suffers from muddled story and one-dimensional characters
AUGUST 2, 2012 NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Colin Farrell’s in the hot seat for the remake ‘Total Recall.’

Colin Farrell’s in the hot seat for the remake ‘Total Recall.’

There’s something sadly poetic about a movie dealing with disappearing memories that vanishes from your mind while you watch it.
Yet that’s the only memorable thing about “Total Recall,” a remake of a schlocky 1990 Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle that, like this new version, was based on a 1960s Philip K. Dick short story.
Where that previous film had cartoonish effects and a Mars-set conclusion, this new one is filled with future-industrial grit and “Blade Runner”-esque squalor. Yet nothing sticks.
Colin Farrell is Quaid, an industrial worker at the end of the 21st century, when chemical warfare has
made most of Earth unlivable. What’s left is the “United Federation of Britain” — where the ruling class resides — and the Colony, a pan-Asian continent teeming with despair, dissatisfaction and apparently every paper lantern ever created.
(There’s decadence, too, though the three-breasted streetwalker in this version only gets a second of screen time per bosom.)
Quaid and his wife, Lori (Kate Beckinsale) dream of escape, so Quaid tries to buy himself some at a company called Rekall, which puts fake experiences in people’s minds so they can forget they’re just peons. Yet Quaid’s head trip opens up a memory he wasn’t aware of: His previous identity as a resistance fighter.
He was aligned with a mysterious underground leader (Bill Nighy, here and gone all in one scene) and in love with a fellow rebel (Jessica Biel). But he must stay ignorant of it all, because there are double-agent twists to his real-life tale. As he digs up who he was, his government operative wife, Lori, tries to kill him.
Director Len Wiseman (“Underworld,” “Live Free or Die Hard”) makes the wanna-be “Matrix” conceit more muddled by not establishing rules within this sci-fi universe. So when Quaid must escape from “synthetic” worker-guards who answer to an evil overlord (Bryan Cranston, doing serious hairpiece acting), he steals an inter-Earth subway easily. In another scene, Colony refugees just tumble out of a plane and onto English streets.
Beckinsale, stalking into rooms like she’s ready for a Vogue shoot, is as undeterred in her mission to kill as the Terminator. Though she and Farrell are the most attractive future drones ever, he in particular has more serious acting chops than “Recall” requires, so he goes on autopilot for much of the film. Facing off against the action-babe automaton Beckinsale (director Wiseman’s real-life wife), Biel barely has time to make an impression,
Screenwriters Kurt Wimmer and Mark Bomback — each responsible for writing some solid action flicks — run out the clock with uninspired chase scenes and made-to-order attitude. What’s missing is actual personality, and a reason to remember why we wound up here in the first place.