“Gemini Man” Movie Review

Gemini Man was directed by Ang Lee from a script by Darren Lemke, Billy Ray, and David Benioff, and stars Will Smith as Henry Brogan, an aging assassin looking to retire from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) due to his increasing lack of confidence in his own abilities and his inability to justify or cope with some of the more morally questionable hits the organization has had him carry out over the years. However, not everyone wants him to be able to retire in the traditional sense, and when Brogan gets wind of some shady dealings going down which are linked to one of his early hits in the film, a rogue band of operatives headed up by Clay Verris (Clive Owen), who were former DIA (I think) launch a project called “Gemini,” sending a hitman after Brogan that’s just as fast, quick-witted, and skilled as he is…in fact, the hitman they send after Brogan is Brogan – or, rather, his clone, dating back 25 years. With not a lot of room or time left to run, Brogan enlists the help of fellow operatives Danny Zakarweski (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and Baron (Benedict Wong) to outrun his past, and if necessary, outrun himself.
 
Ang Lee has been a name almost synonymous with the Oscars since the release of 2000’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which carried with it Best Picture, Director, and Screenplay nominations among its ten total, four of which it won (those being Foreign Language Film, Cinematography, Original Score, and Art Direction). He would go on to make such significant hits as Brokeback Mountain (also a major Oscar contender), and then, in 2012, Lee was awarded Best Director for his work on the visually stunning (though mostly just pretty good) Life of Pi, which also racked up a number of other Oscar nods, including one for Best Picture. Lately, however Ang Lee seems off his game in a number of different ways, not the least of which is that he really only seems interested in the visual components of filmmaking, with little to no regard for story or character anymore. Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, his most recent venture in playing around with high frame rate visual styles (well, besides this one), ended up being one of the worst movies I saw in 2016, and what hurt most about it, apart from the lack of story or interesting characters to follow around (as well as hardly any semblance of basic structure), was that just four years prior, this guy was holding a gold statue for Best Director. And while it’s true that neither of the trailers for Gemini Man particularly impressed me that much, I continued to hold out hope that this could be that game-changing film that brought Lee back into the fold as a major awards contender, or at least that it would be better than it looked. As it turns out, while it’s not exactly Billy Lynn bad, it’s not really all that good (maybe worse than it looked), despite some good will it manages to put forward.
 
I don’t want to entirely start off with the negatives in this review, numerous as they are, so at this point what I will say is that the de-aging effects on Will Smith playing his younger self are staggering, and the consistency with which this technology is applied is astounding. We really are coming to a time in filmmaking history of unprecedented experimentation and power within that experimentation, especially where it concerns visual effects. Apart from The Lion King remake that Disney released in the summer, this might be the most stunning use of visual effects so far this year, even as minimally as those effects are employed, being that they’re really only used for one thing. Whether this film could land an Oscar nod for VFX is still pretty up in the air when considering that the effects in Gemini Man are really more supporting visual effects than anything else (like I said, not a lot of other VFX in here), but after watching this, you definitely can’t count it out of the race.
 
With those effects comes a pretty great performance from Will Smith as well, as he has to pull double duty as two almost completely different characters, each with distinct personalities from a bare-bones script that does him no favors. In fact, the whole main cast is pretty much on their A-game despite not having much to work with from a script perspective. And this is where the flaws of the film start to come into play, and they come to play hard ball. I don’t know if there’s single non-visual or performative element of this film that actually works, but if there were at one point, the editing team scrubbed it right out like a bathtub stain.
 
I’d say that Gemini Man’s plot is far too convoluted to follow, but the truth is the film hardly has any plot at all, strung together by random bits of expository dialogue and vague references to ideas that either got left in the script by accident, or were never fully developed by the time production actually had to start shooting on the film. Nowhere is this further evident than in the spaces between action sequences (of which there are about four major ones), where each scene only lasts a couple minutes, and the editing is so all over the place, you’d think it was done by the same trailer company that worked on Suicide Squad, only this time, without a story to work with. Entire sequences are randomly cut short, and sometimes scenes will just end before the idea the scene was attempting to communicate is finished, and the next action sequence will pop up.
 
There’s hardly any character development either, and while the entire cast is doing their best, their bare-bones characters leave the film feeling empty, like we’re only meant to be watching a tech demo that doesn’t actually have any reason for most of these people to be in it other than their characters just happening to be there. Gemini Man wants you to think its characters and story are compelling, but none of the more compelling aspects of the film are explored for enough time to actually be compelling, and the way the movie flirts with literally any interesting idea, only to dismiss it for the next action sequence, disappointed me to almost no end.
 
In fact, the only non-disappointing thing about this film, apart from the VFX and performances, was the 60 FPS frame rate (and even that managed to still have a few Achilles heels). I saw this film in 3D with the 60 FPS (60 frames per second, for those of you who don’t know what that means in movie terms), and while the action sequences are actually aided quite a bit by this (what of them you can see, anyway), it’s very clear that this is the only format in which the film is meant to be seen, as evidenced by the number of bizarre shots the film would have no reason for keeping if it was only a 2D release, as well as a number of uncomfortable into-the-camera dialogue sequences meant to put you into the mind of who’s being spoken to without ever justifying why you would need to be put into that mind.  
 
In the end, Gemini Man is exactly what I always feared it would end up being, even with how weak its trailer ultimately were; the only things of merit are the technical aspects, and the fact that these performers could carry literally any script (no matter how lackluster or nonexistent) on their backs with no help from anyone. I’m sure Ang Lee means well when making movies like this and Billy Lynn, but I’d really like for him to get back to bringing stories to the screen, rather than just experiments. Visually, Gemini Man is a thing of beauty (for the most part), but separated from the gimmicks it brings to the world of movie-making, it’s just another empty tech demo in a long line of films in 2019 that squandered all they could of their potential.
 
I’m giving “Gemini Man” a 3.8/10
 
- The Friendly Film Fan