Endgame Entertainment
117 min., dir. by Tarsem Singh, with Ben Kingsley, Ryan Reynolds, and Matthew Goode

Seventeen years ago, my parents drove me to SUNY Purchase for my very first college interview. I wanted to go to film school, and this was the first step for me on that journey. Before the interview though, an administrator took me into an empty boardroom, sat me down in front of an empty pad, TV, and a VCR (yes, a VCR). They wanted to play me the opening of a movie, one they hoped I had never seen before. Once the opening was done, the tape stopped and I was asked to write a few pages of what I thought happened next. The film was John Frankenheimer’s Seconds.

From that day forward, I held Seconds as a bit of a sacred cow; it still means a lot to me. So 15 minutes into my screening of the new Tarsem Singh film, Self/less, all I could think was, “Lord, this is a pretty low-rent rip off of Seconds.” I hold no love for trailers so going in, I was pretty clueless to the film’s plot and only knew Sir Ben Kingsley and Ryan Reynolds were in the movie. The minute I had service on my phone again, I had to look it up as I didn’t get any press notes/didn’t print any out before hand, and sure enough, that was the intention the whole time; to remake Seconds.

To wrap up the plot of Self/less quickly for those wondering; Damian Hale (the always outstanding Ben Kingsley) is an aging, terminal ill giant of the real-estate industry in New York. In a last ditch effort to save his own life, he agrees to be part of a young doctor’s genius, though underground treatment that would supplant his mind and memories into the genetically grown body of a young hunk, giving Hale a new lease on life with a new identity. Of course, something goes wrong down the road, and Hale ends up on the run, fighting for his existence.

In recent years, I’ve tried my best to treat remakes/reboots/any reimagining as their own entity. I mean, who wants to see the same exact film again when you can try something different? Yet, like recent attempts at thinking outside the box (Robocop, Total Recall), these new versions are so misguided in terms of what the originals were trying to say in the first place that it’s hard not to hold them to certain standards a fresh IP can avoid.

With out trying to give away either film, Seconds dealt with the idea that man is always tied to the fate of his flaws. Now, I shouldn’t say that it was wrong of Self/less to take the stand a person could indeed change for the better, but A) the way it went about it just fails on all points, and B) contrary to what I just said about Seconds it was trying to say the same thing, but just in a more poignant and elegant way.

The man we are led to believe Hale is while Kingsley is on the screen is cold-hearted, ruthless, selfish, callous, cantankerous, unforgiving — frankly, there are not enough adjectives in English language to truly encompass the depravity of the characters soul. Yet, it takes him a week or two to totally change his tune and become a saint? The opening of the film shows you Hale effortlessly destroying a young man’s business life (and probably his life in general for that point) because this young whippersnapper disrespected Hale behind his back. However, this same man was ready to risk life and limb, just shortly after getting a new lease on life, for people he didn’t even know because someone else may have been hurt to get Hale’s new life going?

Self/less takes the view that unless there is a lot of action and broken bones, the audience’s interest level doesn’t exist. What’s left in the wake is just pure nonsense. The majority of the film follows the Ryan Reynolds version of Hale being hunted by an uber military faction of a renowned scientist’s lab that really seems outside of the box, even for such a hush-hush venture. On top of that, these two warring sides live in a world where money is no object. Sure, they need to make a 90-plus-minute movie, but honestly, the whole movie would have been over an a minute when someone decided to just say, “Okay, here is this money and a plane ticket, go here and never speak to anyone again and take these people you want to help with you, bye.”

Like the majority of junk filtering its way through mainstream movie theaters this day, Self/less is plagued by poor story telling with all too predictable twists and turns. It’s only saving grace are the few fleeting moment Sir Ben graces the screen, because even in the most minimal of screen time, he continues to shine with brilliance. Too bad Self/less just shines with the glimmer of the water that washed it into the gutter.

—

Matthew Schuchman is the founder and film critic of Movie Reviews From Gene Shalit’s Moustache and a contributor to Den of Geek.