Gemini Man. (12A.)
Directed by Ang Lee.
Starring Will Smith, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Clive Owen, Benedict Wong and Ralph Brown. 117 mins.
Will Smith is besides himself in Gemini Man. A brilliant but sensitive hitman, after a mere 72 kills he has decided that it is time to quit so that he can look at himself in the mirror again. But They won't let him and send a younger, cloned, mirror-image version of Smith out to kill.
Like an Argentina vs Germany World Cup final, Will Smith vs Will Smith is a contest where it is hard to conceive what the concept of victory might look like. It seems likely that very little love will be directed towards Ang Lee's low octane action thriller but I found some good in. Granted, concentrating on the character drama in a script that doesn't have any real characters or drama was an error but the smaller scale action sequence are often quite effective.
Most of all it looks like no other film. Ang Lee has persisted with the experiment in shooting in 4K 3D at 120 frames per second, five time the usual 24 fps, that looked so horrible in his previous film Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk. (Even the comparatively restrained 48fps used by Pater Jackson on the first Hobbit film was This time though it sort of works, and gives extra dimensions to the action sequences especially a John Woo style bike chase in Cartagena, Colombia.
The horrible irony of the faster frame rate is that although it is meant to create a most realistic image, which it does, it can also look a bit cheap like it was shot on a phone. Here, I felt the pluses outweighed the minuses but this technological innovation seems to be acting to undermine the other bit of computer jiggery pokery, the de-aging CGI used to create a young Will Smith. The first time he is seen Smith says it is like seeing ghost and he certainly looks more like a ghost (the ghost of former England striker Danny Wellbeck) than a living person.
Directed by Ang Lee.
Starring Will Smith, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Clive Owen, Benedict Wong and Ralph Brown. 117 mins.
Will Smith is besides himself in Gemini Man. A brilliant but sensitive hitman, after a mere 72 kills he has decided that it is time to quit so that he can look at himself in the mirror again. But They won't let him and send a younger, cloned, mirror-image version of Smith out to kill.
Like an Argentina vs Germany World Cup final, Will Smith vs Will Smith is a contest where it is hard to conceive what the concept of victory might look like. It seems likely that very little love will be directed towards Ang Lee's low octane action thriller but I found some good in. Granted, concentrating on the character drama in a script that doesn't have any real characters or drama was an error but the smaller scale action sequence are often quite effective.
Most of all it looks like no other film. Ang Lee has persisted with the experiment in shooting in 4K 3D at 120 frames per second, five time the usual 24 fps, that looked so horrible in his previous film Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk. (Even the comparatively restrained 48fps used by Pater Jackson on the first Hobbit film was This time though it sort of works, and gives extra dimensions to the action sequences especially a John Woo style bike chase in Cartagena, Colombia.
The horrible irony of the faster frame rate is that although it is meant to create a most realistic image, which it does, it can also look a bit cheap like it was shot on a phone. Here, I felt the pluses outweighed the minuses but this technological innovation seems to be acting to undermine the other bit of computer jiggery pokery, the de-aging CGI used to create a young Will Smith. The first time he is seen Smith says it is like seeing ghost and he certainly looks more like a ghost (the ghost of former England striker Danny Wellbeck) than a living person.
