Will Smith and Ang Lee are two names that, when combined, should create magic. Unfortunately, that’s not precisely the case this time around. Smith, who has had a successful career, is not immune to putting out box office duds. Ang Lee is also no stranger to this. While the director has been hailed for his visual style, he too has had his hits and misses, and Gemini Man, while not exactly a dud, is no stud either.
Henry Bogan (Smith) is the best at what he does. He is a deadly assassin who is merely trying to retire. Henry’s plans take a segue when the people he works for send a team to kill him. After they fail Clay Veris (Clive Owen), Henry’s old mentor sends an assassin to hunt him down, only with one catch. The man Veris sends is a younger, stronger clone of Henry himself.
If there were one word, to sum up, Gemini Man, it would be underachieving. In many ways, this film has some strong performances from its cast, particularly from Smith and Owen. Some of the CGI sequences are jaw-dropping, and you have to expect this from Ang Lee. The action in the movie itself is pretty entertaining.
So you would ask, what’s the problem? Where does Gemini Man fail? In the same place, movies like this always do, in their plot. This movie jumps around too much in an attempt to fill runtime. Let’s also talk about some of the writing in this film next. The dialogue here is stale, as well as repetitive. At times it also felt as though the writers of this movie thought the audience was stupid. The film felt the constant need to explain everything that was going on, without allowing the crowd to connect the dots.
It’s a shame when a movie has a cast that performs well, but what they are given to work with feels flat. Smith, Owen, Winstead, and pretty much everyone in the movie turns in some good performances, but you can only do so much, and a film with true potential never reaches its ceiling. By about an hour in, you got the sense that everyone in the theater was beginning to get restless.
One of the more troubling aspects of Gemini Man is that it tries time and time again to catch the audience by using Bogan and Jr.’s (Bogan’s clone) relationship as a father-son type ploy. Still, between watching Will Smith try to mentor himself, and the numb writing that went into the screenplay, that wasn’t going to happen. The film is overall, a clunky mess, and the weird part is that it’s a pretty straight forward movie.
I wanted to enjoy every minute of Gemini Man. Nothing is more frustrating than a good idea and it’s poorly executed, especially when it comes from someone like Ang Lee, and it’s genuinely something, that this is coming from the director who put out Life of Pi. This film honestly had its moments, and man does Will Smith, and the rest of the cast try to make it work. Still, unfortunately, due to the lackluster story that feels the need to hold the viewer’s hand every step of the way, what probably would have been a much better flick, is going to end up being one of the most forgettable movies of 2019.
