Will Smith’s giant hand looms out of the screen towards you, gripping his gun’s trigger with weird realism. Director Ang Lee’s lonely devotion to filming in 120 frames per second 4K 3D, already widely loathed by audiences in less developed form in his own Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (2014) and Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit, is a huge, largely successful element in everything we see here.
A script which had gathered dust for 20 years due to being technically unfilmable then sees Smith’s government hitman Henry Brogan forced out of retirement after being betrayed by his boss Clay (Clive Owen), a fellow ex-Marine with a penchant for Francis Bacon. Soon, the fiftysomething star is locked in a duel with his twentysomething doppelganger, secretly cloned by Clay, and a complete digital construction from the motion-captured Smith in reality. Clay is accused of “playing God with DNA”. This wholly digital actor, like the increasingly prevalent de-ageing process is, though, just as philosophically suspect.
Lee’s recent obsession with technology - see too The Life of Pi’s cast-protecting CGI tiger – is deep in the fibre of his work here. There’s something weightless about the whole affair, from its shop-worn, antique script and second-hand title to the appealingly breezy acting. Bodies pile up and globetrotting backdrops change, but the cast proceed with Zen evenness. The unnerving novelty of the filming process is all of a piece.
Mary Elizabeth Winstead, pictured above right, as FBI agent Dani, who first tails Brogan then sticks by him when both are attacked by Clay’s minions, takes everything in her stride, adding her own implicit intelligence to events which lack them (someone had to spout this scientific assessment of Will Smith-cloning: “It’s complicated – but it’s doable”). Benedict Wong, soon to be seen in Armando Ianucci’s David Copperfield and equally at ease as Brogan’s laidback, Hawaiian-shirted sidekick, is also a reliable pleasure. Smith meanwhile tries to makes you forget Brogan’s unquestioning assassination of 72 people on the hardly reliable orders of the US government, as outsourced to the crazed Clay. He also ensures that, even when fighting Will Smith, Will Smith wins: his ersatz younger self seems more sulky teenager than Fresh Prince, and can’t beat the 51-year-old real thing.
This is a Jerry Bruckheimer film as much as Lee’s, glorying in its high-concept as the producer has done since Top Gun (it’s no surprise Tom Cruise was once attached to star). The international pit-stops – rural Georgia, Liege, Bogota, Budapest – are pure Bond, the action sequences derivative (an urban bike-chase) and dull (Smith and Smith’s muddled wrestling bouts).
What Lee is seeking here, beyond an HD cinema nirvana few others can so far discern, is to combine a successful blockbuster with an entertaining play of existential ideas. It’s there in Clive Owen’s justification for clone armies – “We can keep the whole world safe without any actual grief” – and the thoughtful pauses for Smith-Smith dialogue. The combination of a fine director, untried technology, clunky script and relaxed cast make Gemini Man a very odd film indeed. The more Lee tries to fit in, the further out he gets.
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