Review: Surrogates

Do you secretly wish you could be your favorite character from the video game of your choice? If so, then you'd probably fit right in the futuristic world of Surrogates, where the human population has willingly decided to pack it in and allow their lives to be lived through robotic duplicates. The controllers lounge at home, brains wired like modern day Frankensteins, while their surrogates experience the highs and lows of the outside world. Since everyone can essentially look however they choose, it's eliminated racism, prejudice, and crime apparently. Or so it would seem. That is until a murder is committed outside a swanky nightclub one night, the first murder in many years.

Bruce Willis's Agent Tom Greer is sent to investigate the crime. Willis looks like more like a cigar store indian than an actual human being. His surrogate is deathly creepy, glossy skin and linear features. Willis didn't look this young when he was on Moonlighting, and that was when he was standing next to Curtis "Booger" Armstrong. Greer and his partner, Agent Peterson(Rahda Mitchell), soon discover that the victim is the son of Lionel Canter, the creator of surrogate technology. The question is how did the controller die when his surrogate was destroyed? The surrogate technology was created to prevent exactly that from occurring. The weapon used fries the controller's brain, leaving a goopy mess that reminded me of when that Gremlin was thrown into the microwave.

Greer is thrown headlong into a deep conspiracy. One that leads him to the Dreads, a group of nomadic peoples who reject technology and specifically surrogates. Their leader, the Prophet(Ving Rhames), is a hulking menacing figure who doesn't hesitate to use violence to spread his message. Part of that includes making mincemeat out of Greer's surrogate, and forced to experience the world as his much older, much more frail self, he experiences an epiphany. He now realizes the abomination these surrogates are, and endeavors to re-connect with is wife(Rosamund Pike) who has long since withdrawn totally from everyone around her.

The idea of avatars is one that has become prime story material lately, with films like Gamer, James Cameron's Avatar, also milling a similar theme. It's a concept ripe for exploration, and much like Gamer, Surrogates brushes lightly across the deeper issues involved, but never truly commits. This is basically a crime procedural with robotic decoys in place of humans, and it's their inherent lack of emotion that keeps you from connecting with anybody. It's hard to make an emotional attatchment to characters with no outward emotions whatsoever. I was more concerned about Kim Cattrall in Mannequin than I was anybody in this movie. Hell, I was more concerned about Mesach Taylor than I was anybody in this movie.

Surrogates has such a promising plot that it becomes infuriating watching it devolve into a stock crime picture. I got the impression that a lot was left on the cutting room floor, as nothing ever really seemed to lead where it should. The action isn't particularly intense, and yet the conspiracy angle is lifeless and has all the depth of an episode of Law & Order. It goes exactly where you think it's going to go right from the beginning.

But atleast I managed to stay awake through it. That's gotta count for something.

5/10