Gemini Man (2019)

Over the years, government-owned killer Henry Brogan (Will Smith) has slowly developed (or regained) that most inopportune thing for his job: a conscience. He now simply wants to retire and try being human again. Alas, someone among the people he has been working for all this time (spoiler: it’s Clay Verris as played by house favourite Clive Owen) is trying to kill him. Well, not just him, but basically everyone he has been in contact with for the last couple of weeks or so, including Danny Zakarweski (played by another house favourite, Mary Elizabeth Winstead), the agent sent by another part of Henry’s former organization to simply keep an eye on him and make sure he behaves in his retirement.

After the first hit on Henry fails – and of course causes him and Danny to team up for the rest of the movie – things become rather stranger than our protagonist had expected, for Verris is now sending his best man, well, really rather “kid”, after Henry. Junior (digitally rejuvenated Will Smith), as Verris calls him, turns out to be a clone of Henry, supposedly programmed to be a better killer and soldier.

I don’t hate Ang Lee’s Gemini Man as much as many others seem to do, but that’s probably more because I like the cast a lot, appreciate certain elements of the film, and find the direction it seems to want to take its slab of  big mainstream action cinema somewhat interesting as well as rather sympathetic.

So let’s start out with the good (that I like Winstead and Owen a lot wherever they appear and certainly mind today’s Smith much less than many other actors in his price class needs no repeating, I believe). While the set-up and some of the marketing certainly suggest this to be a film all about having Smith fight digitally youthful Smith to the death, Lee really rather wants to treat this as a drama than a shoot ‘em up, in reality having made a film about a guy who has learned some rather disturbing things about himself and eventually sets out to save a younger man from making these mistakes at all. Which is not just surprisingly un-cynical, but also a kind of direction I’d like more action movies to go in. Another nice element of the film is its treatment of Danny, keeping her away from becoming a love interest (it always feels like a breath of fresh air when men and women are allowed to be friends in cinema), and going out of its way to actually let her do things in the movie. Which would of course work better in a film whose plot doesn’t need to focus as hard as this one on its male main character, but in big budget movies, you take what you can get. And even though it’s not terribly well realized, I also appreciate how the film goes all in with its happy end, really only missing a twist to somehow resurrect Benedict Wong’s character, again lacking the cynicism that’s de rigueur in anything but superhero cinema on the biggest screens right now.


Alas, these well-meant and good ideas and moments never come quite together, Lee seeming curiously unable to put all this into the proper kind of spectacle, instead filming locations, acrobatic action scenes and theoretically insane chases that should suck an audience in to then deliver the other things the film has to say to them with a bland distance I certainly never would have thought Lee even capable of. The film’s look tends to the curiously bland, too, as if all the visual focus had been on making digitally young Will Smith look like an actual human being (which the film achieves excellently), and nothing whatsoever into making the world he moves through feel exciting and dangerous.