11.19.2016

Movies: Self/less

Generic and boring would-be thriller without the thrills. It probably looked good on paper, but in reality the story isn't all that compelling and the filmmakers don't do anything to make you care about the characters.

Ben Kingsley plays, for all of about 15 minutes, a dying real estate magnate whose digs looks suspiciously Trump-like. He hires an underground company called Phoenix (not the one MacGyver worked for) to transfer his consciousness into a new body (Ryan Reynolds). He's told that the bodies are lab-created, but of course it turns out they're actually "used." I think the movie should have been called Refurbished.

After becoming Ryan Reynolds, he's also given a new identity and forced to take meds that suppress the memories of the body's previous occupant. When he misses a dose, he begins to get flashes and feels driven to hunt down the woman and little girl he sees. Lucky for him, a quick Google image search shows him exactly where to go.

And of course he's pursued by Phoenix, etc. etc. But I wasn't interested enough in this guy's back story, nor did they make things tense and taut enough to hold my attention. While the idea of swapping bodies seems like a great premise, the rest of the film fails to honor the promise of that being an entertaining starting point. Self/less is dull, dull, dull. It stumbles from scene to scene disjointedly and without the strength to pull the viewers' interest along with it.

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