Admittedly, it is a pretty irresistible hook: what if you weren’t you, but a cooler, more exciting, more dangerous version of you, and you just didn’t know it? What if the humdrum life you lead was a lie, and you didn’t even know that your real life was like something out of a movie? Your spouse, your job, your house, all of it, just part of an elaborate plot to keep you from a life of intrigue? Worse yet: what if this secret life was just a delusion?
It’s so juicy a concept – a mindbender based, naturally, on a twisty Philip K. Dick story – that Hollywood already made it once in 1990, with Arnold Schwarzenegger and famously crazed Dutch director Paul Verhoeven at the helm. The 2012 version of Total Recall puts Colin Farrell in the Arnold role, down-on-his-luck schlub Doug Quaid. Quaid lives in a high-rise tenement in post-apocalyptic London, one of the world’s few inhabitable areas, and commutes across the world to another, Australia, to work a thankless job on a robot assembly line. Despite being married to the girl of his dreams, Lori (Underworld’s Kate Beckinsale, as the world’s most ridiculously attractive beat cop), Quaid can’t shake the feeling he wants more out of life. He finds answers in the form of Rekall, a company that specializes in implanting fake memories – a mental vacation for a populace that can’t really go anywhere anyway.
To indulge his fantasy life, Quaid chooses Rekall’s “secret agent” package, a suite of false memories that will convince him that he had a rousing adventure as a spy before returning him to his blue-collar life. No sooner do they start messing with his head than government agents storm the facility, sending Quaid on the run and into the arms (and guns) of Melina (Jessica Biel), who claims that Quaid is really Hauser, prominent figurehead of a rebel faction looking to violently oust government leader Cohaagen (Bryan Cranston of “Breaking Bad”).
With that, Quaid/Hauser and Melina are off, searching for a mysterious resistance leader (Bill Nighy) while trying to put together how and why Hauser was living a completely different life as Quaid. This mostly entails Quauser and Melina jumping from one thing onto another thing as a third thing explodes in the background, all while being pursued by Cohaagen’s agents and his chief lieutenant (who is, naturally, Lori, revealed as an agent assigned to keep an eye on her “husband”). Lori pursues them with the intensity of Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive, had Jones had Revlon and could run in heels.
That mind-blower of a concept, the idea of what constitutes reality and the problematic nature of perception, is given a little bit of lip service, but quickly falls to the wayside in favor of action scenes. The Verhoeven version was far from subtle in pretty much every way, but it at least toyed with the audience more effectively than director Len Wiseman does here. At no point does the nominal notion that the events of the movie are really Quaid playing out his spy fantasy too far seem even remotely convincing; Wiseman effectively stages the action, but his style is too blunt to get across the idea of warping reality the movie desperately wants to convey. There are nice flourishes throughout, such as doors and windows that basically function as iPads, that attempt the kind of world-building seen in movies like Minority Report (another loose Dick adaptation), though it all winds up buried in the wake of Quaid’s crosstown rampage, heady ideas shunted aside so the setting can be used to stage flying car chases instead.
On the surface, there’s nothing wrong with pure action. Wiseman, the director of the Underworld movies and Live Free or Die Hard, might be a hack, but he’s a proficient hack. The fights, with the crashes and the gunfire and the CG cityscape in various states of destruction, are exciting and decently staged, and they’d be thrilling enough in a different movie. There’s nothing inherently wrong with remakes, either, though it helps to have something new to say, or at least a novel way of saying it. You could make a Bingo card out of Total Recall 2012’s homages to Total Recall 1990 – all the stuff anyone remembers from it is referenced – and it only serves to highlight how irrelevant this new take really is. The movie’s crime is not that it chooses action over thought (it’s not as if Arnold brought any dramatic weight to bear while spouting one-liners on the surface of Mars), only that it wastes its potential on a slick veneer and little else. It wants to pose questions about the nature of reality, but every second of it shows that there’s nothing more than what you see.
Rating: 2 Stars
Film: Total Recall
Starring: Colin Farrell, Kate Beckinsale, Jessica Biel, Bokeem Woodbine, Bryan Cranston, and Bill Nighy
Directed By: Len Wiseman
Story By: Kurt Wimmer
Screenplay By: Kurt Wimmer and Mark Bomback
Based On: “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” by Philip K. Dick
Produced By: Toby Jaffe and Neal H. Moritz
Distributor: Columbia Pictures
Rating: PG-13
Running Time: Approximately 118 minutes
Website: http://www.welcometorecall.com/
Budget: $125,000,000
Genre: Action, Science Fiction
Release Date: August 3, 2012
