(No) Thanks for the memories

FILM REVIEW

Total Recall
DIRECTED BY: Len Wiseman
STARRING: Colin Farrell, Kate Beckinsale, Jessica Biel
CERT: 12A

Another week, another blast from the past.
I would ask why, but the answer is fairly obvious. A generation has grown to adulthood since 1990, when Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall was released. That’s a whole new generation of ticket buyers to fleece. For the suits, that’s reason enough.
The story hasn’t changed that much, bar one crucial detail. This time around, nobody goes to Mars. Life is rough enough on Earth, which is banjaxed on account of chemical warfare, with only two civilizations remaining. There’s the United Federation of Britain, where the elite dwell. Then there’s The Colony on the other side of the planet, where the underlings live and do the grunt work. Citizens travel between these locations by means of a tunnel in the earth, reducing the old long haul between Britain and Australia to mere minutes. Which is handy.
Doug Quaid (Farrell) works in a factory on The Colony, building robo-cops who look like store brand Stormtroopers. Though he is married to the lovely Lori (Beckinsale), he dreams of better things. Not a trip to the red planet, like Arnie. Just a more exciting time, like being a spy, maybe. So off he pops to the Rekall shop for a memory implant, his own little fantasy life. However, he discovers that the life he’s been living all along is not even real and that he is, in fact, a secret agent whose memory has been wiped by the government.
His real name is Jason Bourne.
OK, it’s not, but it would have been more interesting if it was. He does gallop around a lot, though, accompanied by old flame Melina (Biel), now a resistance fighter. She does a lot of fighting, too, even getting to trade blows with Doug’s wife. Sadly, the mad spouse is not half as much fun as she was way back in the day, when she was played by a relatively unknown (at the time) Sharon Stone.
That’s really the problem here, this lack of fun. It’s not that the film is entirely atrocious, because it has a thing or two going for it. It looks fantastic, there’s a lot of decent action and Jessica Biel is always easy on the eye.
It’s all just, well, kind of dull. It’s like reliving your favourite summer, a dream designed by someone who doesn’t know you at all. So your friends are better looking but they’ve lost their sense of humour. Your car is nicer but it lacks the charm of your old banger. And the music is not the classic pop and rock of your youth, but an X Factor compilation album. The heart, soul, wit and personality you remember are all missing in action. The shell looks nice but there’s nothing inside.
There’s another thing. Colin Farrell and some of his co-stars here are fine actors but they’re not really movie stars. Arnold Schwarzenegger couldn’t act the maggot, and some of his lines in Total Recall were laughable in all the wrong ways. But he was a movie star. Still is. Which is why people love to watch big dumb movies like The Expendables.
Real movie stars and real fun. Sometimes that’s all we want.

The Watch
DIRECTED BY: Akiva Schaffer
STARRING: Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn, Jonah Hill, Richard Ayoade
CERT: 15A

The Watch was originally titled Neighbourhood Watch, until Trayvon Martin was shot and killed by armed watchman George Zimmerman in February.
The lads at 20th Century Fox quickly changed the name and scaled back the marketing, but they’d have done us all a favour by dumping the thing entirely.
This is another of the new breed of bro-movies, the kind of thing where grown men sit around shouting vulgar nonsense at each other and run around being stupid. Sometimes these films can be funny. This is not one of those films.
Ben Stiller is Evan, manager at a local Costco, the wholesale warehouse chain whose dollars have bought them 95 minutes of product placement. Evan is having trouble at home, there being a distinct lack of babies around the place. He’s having bigger trouble at work, where a security guard has turned up brutally dead. Along with buddies Bob (Vaughn), Franklin (Hill) and Jamarcus (Ayoade), he sets up a neighbourhood watch. When they can drag themselves away from partying, the lads discover the culprits are not a bunch of young hooligans mad on drugs. They are bodysnatching aliens, disguised in the skins of their victims.
This set-up could have been funny and clever, considering the talent on board. Unfortunately director Akiva Schaffer, his writers (Seth Rogen was one) and his cast all seem to be content to take the low road, the lazy gags, the tired, crude garbage that people with this kind of talent should be embarrassed to associate themselves with.
Awful.