To anyone who says "Total Recall" isn't a remake of the 1990 Arnold Schwarzenegger film, just think breasts. The three-boobed hooker from Paul Verhoeven's original once again bares her mutant chest, though she's now a streetwalker who gives our hero directions to the memory-implant store. And the hero, no longer played by a quip-disgorging Austrian bodybuilder, is a dour Colin Farrell whose asymmetrical eyebrows tell us all we need to know about the burdens of being a late 21st century drone.
All he does is work. Back and forth to the robot plant he goes, commuting via a giant elevator that speeds through the Earth's core from the concrete beehives of "the Colony" to the United Federation of Britain. Visually, the former owes everything to "Blade Runner." The latter owes everything to "Metropolis," from which "Total Recall" also borrows a few timeless proletarian themes. Nothing like class struggle to enliven a PG-13 bullet-fest.
Director Len Wiseman (who made the first two "Underworlds" and the indefatigably diverting "Live Free and Die Hard") and screenwriters Kurt Wimmer and Mark Bomback have ditched the spewing gore of the R-rated original. They've replaced it with lots of giant guns going blammety-blam-blam while Farrell gets chased around computer-generated skyscrapers by cops that look like remaindered "Star Wars" Stormtroopers.
Farrell is Doug Quaid, the sad fellow who visits the false-memory-merchants Rekall in search of a little excitement and winds up with too much. Doug wants to feel like a hotshot secret agent. Instead, he discovers that he actually is a hotshot secret agent. In the midst of all this brain-warping confusion, Doug discovers that his wife (Kate Beckinsale) isn't actually his wife and that the lady he sees in his dreams (Jessica Biel) isn't actually a dream, unless of course she is.
"Total Recall" is loosely based on a story by Philip K. Dick, whose colorfully trippy meditations on time, reality, God and human consciousness so often get bleached on their trip to the screen. Wiseman's effort, like many sci-fi flicks these days, suffers from a bored dystopian vision of the future - a reflexively washed-out portrait of the glum urban suckiness that awaits us all. Farrell seems to know this, grumbling his few, flat one-liners with an ennui that skirts profound depression.
For all of its dazzlingly rendered cityscapes and nonstop action, this revamped "Total Recall" is a bland thing - bloodless, airless, humorless, featureless.
Rating : 2/5
Movie Review Total Recall 2012 English, English Movie Review, Hollywood Movie Total Recall Review 2012
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