Science saves Self/less
FILM | Chuck Koplinski
Tarsem Singh’s Self/less uses a common wish as the basis for its premise: What would you do if you were given the chance to live your life again? This has been used in the movies many times over, most famously in It’s a Wonderful Life as well as the cult movie Seconds – to which this film has more than a passing resemblance. It seems more timely with advances in cloning and the medical implications of 3-D printers. It’s sci-fi elements are the best parts of the movie, delivered with an air of plausibility that’s unsettling. Had the script by Alex and David Pastor stuck to the nuts and bolts of the procedure it proposes and its moral implications, the film would have been more sound. However, a touch of safe storytelling, in the form of action movie conventions that rear their ugly head in the third act, prevent this from being a completely successful endeavor.
Damian Hale (an effectively icy Ben Kingsley) is a self-made man, a billionaire New York City developer who’s been told the cancer he’s been diagnosed with has metastasized and he has only weeks to live. He’s willing to test the maxim that money can’t buy everything when he consults a mysterious company called Phoenix Biogenics. Run by Dr. Albright (Matthew Goode), he’s told of a process known as “shedding,” where a person would be able to abandon his failing body and have his consciousness transferred to a younger, healthy one that’s been grown in the lab. Other than forking over boatloads of money, Hale would be required to sever all ties with his past and stage his own death in a public place. Seems easy enough and the process goes off without a hitch as the old financier wakes up afterwards in the body of a healthy specimen (Ryan Reynolds) and is instructed to take things slow and always take his medication to prevent the host from rejecting him.
Wouldn’t you know it, staying out all night, bedding a different woman each day and living life to the fullest gets in the way of taking those cryptic red pills he’s been given and once he misses a dose, Hale is bombarded with hallucinations he can’t explain. Curiosity may have killed the cat and it ends up nearly doing the same to our hero as he decides to investigate these visions, leading him to discover some horrific revelations concerning Albright and Phoenix Biogenics.
Singh’s known for his visually distinctive work (The Cell, The Fall) so it’s a bit of a surprise that the film lacks anything unique in terms of how it’s composed, particularly during the hallucination sequences. It isn’t that the movie looks bad, it simply comes off as a standard Hollywood production. That being said, the director does create a sterile, nearly barren atmosphere where Phoenix Biogenics is concerned, suggesting a morgue more than a cutting-edge laboratory. This casts a nice pall over the proceedings, which is wonderfully underscored by Goode’s cold rendering of the piece’s Dr. Frankenstein, Albright.
It goes without saying that Kingsley is good – this is a part he could do in his sleep – and his presence helps ground and validate the film, in particular a nice scene with Downton Abbey’s Michelle Dockery as his character’s estranged daughter. While the movie is designed for his appearances to be of a limited nature, a few more moments with the acclaimed actor would have been welcome. Reynolds is fine as well, not required to do much we haven’t seen him do before, but it’s obvious that he’s becoming increasingly comfortable on screen, his likeability factor helping to hide his lack of range.
The film is good until Hale tracks down the main culprit behind the experimental shell game he’s fallen victim to, and then standard scenes of cloak-and-dagger bad guys repeatedly chasing our hero become tedious and threaten to undercut the inventive storytelling that’s come before. However, the climax is a keeper as Hale is forced to come to terms with the morality of his decisions and chooses to act in an altruistic manner that once would be foreign to him. This character’s redemption in turn redeems Self/less, saving it from being just another run-of-the-mill thriller.
Contact Chuck Koplinski at ckoplinski@usd116.org.
