In “Gemini Man,” Will Smith faces his own worst enemy—himself, much younger.
Two Will Smiths pursue each other in Ang Lee’s thriller
In “Gemini Man,” there are two Will Smiths, and one is tr ying to kill the other. To make things potentially more interesting, one is middle-aged and one is in his early twenties. So, automatically, there are possibilities here — a movie about a psyche at war with itself or perhaps a movie about the contrasts between youth and middle age.
But no. What we got here is the basic situation: Two Will Smiths, one trying to kill the other. Nothing fancy, just that.
Technologically, “Gemini Man” is borderline miraculous. We might think we’re watching two Smiths, one regular and one de-aged. In fact, the younger (cloned) Smith doesn’t really exist, except as a 100-percent digital creation that ’s just dropped into the frame. That’s remarkable, but as with everything that ’s technologically remarkable, you can only say wow for five minutes. Then you get used to it, and you’re back to watching a particular story with a particular actor.
A small part of the film’s problem is Smith himself, nothing he does, just something intrinsic to him as a screen actor: We don’t need two of him. That’s a f lip way of saying something a little deeper, that this is not an actor with a riddle to his personality. Imagine, for example, the Jessica Chastain of today starring opposite a CGI version of herself at 70. You can almost write the scenes. You can imagine the possibilities for conf lict and revelation.
Within his sphere, Smith is an entirely engaging actor, but the screenplay doesn’t capitalize on the central gimmick ’s possibilities. Mostly, the presence of two Smiths just gives us scenes of them shooting at or fighting each other, but you know that no one will get seriously hurt.
The one place where director Ang Lee’s touch can be felt is in the casting. He puts the talented Mary Elizabeth Winstead as the second lead, doesn’t glamour her up and doesn’t devise some obligatory romance. He makes Clive Owen the nervous, driven villain of the piece, who dreams of a “Star Wars”-style cloned army. And he casts an interesting character actor, Benedict Wong, as our hero’s war buddy. Now, if only these actors were given something worth saying to each other.
Before the clone aspect kicks in, “Gemini Man” is humming along as a brisk, competent action movie. Henry (Smith) works for the government as a master assassin, killing only bad guys. And then one day, he shoots a guy in the neck, not the head, and he realizes: He’s losing a step. So he announces his retirement and settles down. That’s when he finds out that the government has been using him, that his last supposed bad guy/victim was actually a good guy and a victim of a diabolical American plot.
Once he knows that, well, he knows too much.
Had “Gemini Man” continued on that line, Lee might have had something more diverting than two hours of watching Will Smith try not to shoot himself.