Monday, Sep. 28, 2009

'Surrogates' showcases Willis, smart plot

By Edward Robertson, atomictown.com

Much as I love them, most action blockbusters are so stupid that as soon as I get home from one I have to go to my bookshelf, get out Moby Dick, fall asleep, and drool all over page iii.

-- Times, theaters.

I'm just about convinced "blockbuster" is actually the description for what they do to your head. Yet like chewy chocolate chip cookies, parachuteless skydiving and other dubiously healthy pursuits, I'm addicted to them. I'm literally watching one as I write this. (My precious Pitch Black, which was hardly a blockbuster in terms of ticket sales, but which spawned one hell of a huge stupid sequel, and has left me in the increasingly forlorn position of defending Vin Diesel whenever his name comes up. I try to pretend The Fast and the Furious was just some other dopey loaf of man-beef.)

When a movie that has all the trappings of a blockbuster (big movie star, righteous explosions, at least one chase scene so ludicrous even the offspring of Hercules and Superninjette couldn't pull it off) tries to go beyond delivering endlessly rewatchable action, like having a non-nonsensical plot, it's like deafening, fireball-based music to my ears. The new thriller Surrogates doesn't do everything right, but bonus points for effort.

In the near future, mankind has all but universally switched over to surrogates, robotic stand-ins that interact with the world while we control them from the safety of our beds. If your surrogate is damage or destroyed, you wake up perfectly unharmed.

The son of the man who invented isn't so lucky. When his surrogate is destroyed by a strange new weapon, he dies, too. FBI agents Bruce Willis and Radha Mitchell are assigned to the case, but they quickly suspect the killing is part of a bigger scheme — possibly involving the Dreads, the revolutionary anti-surrogate movement holding out in small pockets of the nation.

That there is a pretty sweet concept. It's so sweet, in fact, that fellow nerds will recognize it as the rough plot of Snow Crash, the classic tale of Sumerian mythology and high-speed pizza delivery, and sci-fi thrillers don't get much sweeter than that.

But Surrogates fleshes out its own world with clear rules for what's happened to us, a detailed future history, and a great makeup scheme that makes all the surrogates look like airbrushed underpants models while the actual humans resemble the stuff stuck in your wheelwells after a long drive on the ice. It isn't afraid to make thematic use of this hotness gap, either, finding a lot of mileage in pointing out how one of the first things we'd do with this brilliant technology is make ourselves all look like 22-year-old blondes. That's one of the many reasons I like sci-fi: it's always finding new ways to call you a jerk.

One of the other reasons I like sci-fi is it can sneak in the satire at the same time it's overloading your eyeballs with fierce human-on-robot violence. Director Jonathan Mostow puts together some nice action sequences, notably the one where a one-armed Willis-bot goes woohoo-crazy chasing down a suspect in a rusty old junkyard.

Surrogates has less luck on the human side, dedicating an ineffectual subplot to the distance between Willis and his surrogate-addicted wife. It's a good effort, but it's too generic to whip up any serious emotional traction.

If it had paid off, it might have kicked the movie up to potential classic status. As it is, Surrogates is tightly plotted, well-told and smart — and isn't afraid to have a little fun punching robots in the face, either.

Grade: B