Bruce Willis has been one of my most favorite heroes since Die Hard came out. After enjoying major box office success the world over for many years Bruce Willis has been having a bit of a hard time at the BO after the drubbing of 2003’s Tears of the Sun. There have been flashes of the old Bruce Willis in movies like Sin City, Grindhouse, and Live Free or Die Hard but they have been very few in between. His latest offering Surrogates too will not be changing the equation much. The movie is a decade late and follows along the lines of most recent sci-fi flicks like Gamer, Terminator Salvation but is really not in the league of the better ones like I Robot, District 9, or even the latest blockbuster Avatar.
It’s the future (isn’t it always) and humans no longer step out. Instead they use virtual bodies called Surrogates which look and behave exactly like them because the humans are controlling them via lots of wires and a console, but the Surrogates themselves are superhuman, stronger, faster and never age. The concept behind using the Surrogates is that humans themselves are safe in their homes while their Surrogates never take any damage, but all this changes with the murder of two Surrogates by a new electronic weapon, which also kills (well literally fries) the humans controlling the Surrogates in their consoles. Bruce Willis and Radha Mitchell are the agents called in to investigate the case and Bruce Willis does show his flair a bit as the nosey investigator never wanting to quit or even obey orders.
Thrown into the plot are Ving Rhames (The Prophet) who leads a group of humans opposing the usage of the Surrogates, humans who have their own colonies not open to Surrogates (yikes humans only), James Cromwell as the brilliant scientist and creator of Surrogates and Rosamund Pike plays Bruce Willis’ disgruntled wife. The story is pretty linear with Bruce Willis and Radha Mitchell on the trail of the killer which leads them deeper and higher into the echelons of power and things all tie in nicely into the final plan of destroying all Surrogates basically putting an end to their usage once and for all.
Bruce Willis is a great action star but unfortunately Surrogates has only a couple of major action sequences and the pretty ladies in Radha Mitchell and Rosamund Pike are wasted. James Cromwell is once again repetitive as the genius scientist who creates something that cannot be controlled and Ving Rhames is well Ving Rhames. I’m not saying Surrogates is a bad movie, it is entertaining and eminently watchable, just not a great movie and definitely not the best of Bruce Willis. I expected better from Jonathan Mostow after his last two action blockbusters Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines and U-571 both of which give a good workout to my home theater and subwoofer even today.
