Total Recall is one of the great nature/nurture studies of our day – it poses, quite simply, scratch that, it poses in no simple terms whatsoever, that if you give any man a different set of memories, you get a different man. All you have to do is present Hitler with a fluffy bunny childhood and he suppresses his natural instinct to hate and destroy, right? It’s a theory.
Colin Farrell drew the short straw in the “who gets to be compared to Arnold Schwarzenegger?” lottery. There’s just no winning that one. Can you out-act Schwarzenegger? May as well ask presidential candidates if they’re smarter than Ronald Reagan. Farrell is Doug Quaid, a man haunted by dreams in futurama Big Brother world. Sorta obsessed with a need for a psyche enema, Doug heads to Rekall, a company which gives memory implants with the same care it handles basic spelling.
Fans of the blockbuster 1990 version will “recall” Quaid was obsessed with Mars. The 2012 producers decided Mars was ridiculous and settled on the far more reasonable: a plot that involves a 90-second shuttle through the core of the planet as mass transportation. See, there are two remaining livable spots on Earth. The “good” place is England, er The Federation, which looks like Minority Report, and the “bad” place, Australia, er The Colony, which looks like Blade Runner. If you suck, you live down under and commute to work.
The gimmick to Recall is that Quaid really isn’t Quaid, but he doesn’t know it. His trip to Rekall unlocks memories and violent instincts and pretty soon the screen is littered with bodies. Who is the real Doug Quaid? Mild mannered Joe-iRobot-assembly-liner or political secret agent? It’s a mystery. The bigger question for me, however, is, “who is the brunette?” See, there are two in the film, Kate Beckinsale and Jessica Biel, and I’m sorry to say neither is distinctive enough to rule out being the other. It doesn’t help that one actually impersonates the other during the film. Great, now I have a 0% chance of telling you two apart.
If you study carefully, there’s still some nice existential fun to be had here, like when Quaid returns to his Federation home a “changed” man and has a little concerto on his time. Sure, after discovering my life has been a lie, escaping a dozen police cars and dropping out of the sky, what’s better than a little Beethoven on an instrument I “don’t know how to play?” The Harpo Marx interlude triggers an interactive hologram of Quaid himself on the piano. Well of course it does, why wouldn’t it? And then we get a scene of Colin Farrell with beard talking to Colin Farrell, “clean shaven.” Is one of them evil? Is one of them actually a bust of Beethoven and the other Schroeder from Peanuts?
I am embarrassed to say that if alter ego me sat at a piano, the trigger song to reunion would probably go something like: ♪ There’s a place in France… ♪
Disguises, disguises, using what set of eyes?
Pretend you’re a hero and wave righteous flag
But a flawed personality seeps through any guise
If so, then douche is your bag
Rated PG-13, 118 Minutes
D: Len Wiseman
W: Mark Bomback, Ronald Shusett, Dan O’Bannon, Jon Povill & Kurt Wimmer
Genre: Rememory
Type of person most likely to enjoy this film: The existential deprived
Type of person least likely to enjoy this film: Schwarzeneggerites
