Review by Reid Ramsey
Henry Brogan is being hunted. Running down the street, the world-class hitman glances over his shoulder to catch sight of his assailant. Henry glances through the scope on his rifle, and just before his automated instinct to pull the trigger kicks in, he sees him.
He sees himself, but younger.
Caught off guard in what must feel like a hallucination, Henry, for the only time, hesitates and misses his opportunity. He suppresses his tactical instincts and opts for the impractical approach of reason. The man who struggles to look his own way when passing by a mirror must spend the rest of the movie directly confronting himself and his past.
Gemini Man, the newest technological experiment from Ang Lee, follows Henry (Will Smith) as his government hunts him out of retirement for knowing too much. Mary Elizabeth Winstead trips into the picture and holds her own as Dany, an agent who helps the disavowed Henry stay alive. Following the movie’s centerpiece chase sequence — which includes motorcycle dueling and stunning slow motion work — the two realize that the assassin chasing Henry is not a lookalike or even Henry’s son, but a clone of Henry himself. The clone’s name is Junior (Will Smith, de-aged) and from his closely-controlled upbringing, he takes everything the original has to offer and makes it just slightly better.
How do you make the perfect soldier? Clone the guy who is currently the best and remove the obstacles that slowed down his development.
As do many other action movies derided for their nonsensical plots, Gemini Man primarily succeeds through its impressive action and emotional clarity. Only the second feature film shot at 120-frames-per-second, the action scenes possess an unmatched real-world verisimilitude. The image clarity is that of a high-def sports game, and while it may not be a good match for many movies, Lee’s movie was a perfect fit for the form.
Henry is worn down by years of assassinations. He can no longer bear the weight of his own image and is only a shadow of who he was. His body has been endlessly used and exploited by the government. Even in retirement, he knows there’s no true escape. So when Junior shows up as the young, shiny, literally perfect version of himself, his body wakes back up. It’s no longer about keeping himself alive, but instead about helping this kid find some hope in the bankrupt world in which he was raised.
All this is without mentioning, too, that Junior just doesn’t look quite… right. The de-aging looks mostly convincing — outside of one horrendous looking scene in the coda — but still, to take an icon like Will Smith and de-age him is a tricky enterprise. Junior is in his mid-twenties. He’s basically the age Will Smith was when he took over TV with The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air in the 90s. It’s the age in which everyone thinks of Will Smith, regardless of his many iconic movie roles that followed. To attempt to transform Smith now back into that same persona has its pitfalls. He’s much more muscular now than he was back then. His voice sounds quite a bit different. The computer-generated facial expressions can’t match the charisma he had back then.
Still, with all of the de-aging effects seeming to work against the uncanny version of the Fresh Prince himself, it ends up working in the movie’s favor. Instead of trying to imply intent from Lee, it’s better to talk about how the movie reads as a meta-text. Henry and Junior both portray perverted versions of one man. Henry’s mind and body are destroyed by the agency for which he works, while Junior’s mind and body never belonged to him in the first place. Junior is essentially a facsimile of Henry. While a facsimile may look identical to the real work in every way, no one gets too upset if you accidentally rip a page. Well, they might get upset, but they’re only upset at the loss of money, they aren’t upset at the loss of a one-of-a-kind historical/artistic work like they would be if you, say, ripped the original. The flaw with Junior being a facsimile of Henry is that he still has all sorts of real emotions swirling inside him. He’s not disposable, even if the government views him that way.
To say Ang Lee thought of his own ventures in High Frame Rate technology as a foray into facsimile cinema would be not only be a stretch, it would be outright wrong. Lee adores this technology, and for good reason! It looks phenomenal.
Yet it still superficially comes across as a copy, and that’s backed up by the plot. Henry has been tormented, abused, and exploited for propaganda endlessly in similar ways that movies always have been. Movies have never belonged singularly but instead to whoever is making them. Junior, perhaps as a metaphor for HFR technology, was also never in control of his own destiny. HFR was destined for HD sports broadcasts and slow-motion YouTube videos, therefore existing well outside the realm of movies. Both forms have been so perverted by their controllers that they have slowly ceased to look like themselves. One looks too old and the other looks like a cheap copy.
Alongside an elaborate metaphor for growing filmmaking technology, Gemini Man also possesses a sincere and surprising emotional tenderness. The interactions between Henry and Junior gain an almost too tender father-son dynamic by the end of the movie. Smith delivers a stellarly haggard performance as Henry and a committed one as Junior, fitting for both characters. Winstead supports with her type of strong, fun, emotionally complex performance that seems to more and more cement her as one of the great genre actresses.
Gemini Man took quite a while to come to the big screen. The end product, though, is well worth the wait. It’s a movie lost in time. Written in the 90s, the technology didn’t quite exist to make it until now. It’s in limbo, oscillating between a love for movies and a desire for their traditional form’s destruction and between one era of filmmaking and another.
When taking into consideration the completely fluid state of movies and streaming and all the arguments over ownership these days, Gemini Man feels like the perfect movie for right now.