Total Recall

The end of the summer always brings up the blockbuster backwash; movies that the major studios don’t want to compete with their tallest of the tent-poles, but something showy enough to keep people spending their money, looking to stay out of the heat. Sometimes we get surprises like last year’s “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” but this year we will have to slum it for another week with “Total Recall”.

“Total Recall” is yet another gritty remake of a campy cult-movie from yesteryear. The 1990 original was directed by Dutch filmmaker Paul Verhoven, a man whose cinematic tastes have brought us satirical action movies like “Robocop” and “Starship Troopers”. This remake is helmed by Len Wiseman, the director of the first two “Underworld” movies.  Both versions are based on the short story  “We Can Remember it For You Wholesale” by Phillip K. Dick, a dark, cerebral writer who has provided the source material for other science-fiction films like “Blade Runner”, “Minority Report” and “The Adjustment Bureau”. 

For the most part, the plot of this remake basically follows that of the original, with the exception that Mars is no longer set as a key location. Colin Farrell plays Douglas Quaid, a middle class factory worker, who literally dreams for a better, more exciting life as a secret agent. In the movie’s futuristic setting, a company called Recall offers a special service to give people the memories and fantasies they desire. After being strapped in for a mind-ride, it’s discovered that he might actually be a spy after all. What’s more is everyone in his new life, including his spouse (Kate Beckinsale) might be in on an elaborate ruse to keep the memory of his heroic past repressed.  While on the run from the government, he is picked up and protected by Melina (Jessica Biel), a freedom fighter from a lower-class colony located in what is now Australia.

So what is there to say about this “Total Recall”? If you have seen the trailer, then you know exactly what you’re getting.  Like Wiseman’s “Underworld” movies it’s a rainy, melancholy action film, made for those who are too young to remember movies before “The Matrix”.  Stylistically this “Total Recall” owes a big debt to many other films before it. The production design seemed to be patched together from the other aforementioned PK. Dick adaptations, as well as countless other sci-fi films like “Dark City” and “Inception”. The pacing and direction of the action scenes, shot around a series of long running-and-chasing set-pieces, seemed to greatly resemble the Bourn trilogy as well. What Wiseman can do skillfully is almost make you forget that everything you are watching is something someone else has already done better.

So how does this version hold up against the original? Well, unlike Wiseman, who seems to be more interested in the dress and sets of his movies, Paul Verhoven is a strange kind of Hollywood auteur director who knows how to bring a sense of humor and purpose to his science-fiction, oftentimes making broad critiques of America’s consumer culture and militaristic complexes. Even if his movies tend to date themselves with time, as the original “Total Recall”--which mistakenly had cast Schwarzenegger in the lead--certainly does, what his version had that the new one doesn’t is personality. Despite being full of bad one-liners and now-cheesy special effects, Verhoven’s vision of this story was a funny and sleazy sort of genre film that surprisingly had a lot to say about identity, masculine fantasy and dream-logic. What this new one brings to the table is a consistent and competent action ride that will entertain you for the moment you watching it, but will eventually be erased from your memory.

Grade: C-

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Aug-2012