Review: Self/less
Wednesday, July 15, 2015 at 7:30PM 
Tim here. Over the course of four movies starting with The Cell in 2000, director Tarsem Singh has established a very distinct approach to making movies. This basically consists of applying extraordinary, unreal style to thin, whispy stories, not using style to replace substance, but using the absence of substance as an argument in favor of style as a primary storytelling and character-building technique. This has earned him as many enemies as fans, and I don't know if anybody genuinely liked 2011's Immortals, but he's certainly established himself as one of the most distinctive visionaries working in anything like the mainstream.
And now, we find what he just can't do. Self/less is the director's fifth movie, possibly his worst, and beyond question his most generic. The director's biggest and boldest visual gesture is to use a lot of sideways tracking shots. Is this what the loss of the magnificent graphic artist Eiko Ishioka, who designed the costumes for all of Tarsem's previous movies before her death in 2012, means to his aesthetic? Then there's no reason to ever hope for him again. But there has to be something deeper than that, for Self/less shares production designer Tom Foden from all of the director's work outside of The Fall, and he's pretty thoroughly dropped the ball here. There's only one set in the film that feels even slightly distinctive on any level, a sleek grey ultramodern medical lab, and even that feels like a slightly more austere version of a thing we can see in at least three or four movies every year. [More...]
With the style basically giving up, that gives us plenty of time to focus on the screenplay by brothers David & Àlex Pastor, and this is something we should really not be focusing on. Self/less tells the story of 68-year-old Damian Hayes (Ben Kingsley), a black-hearted New York developer whose body has turned into a playground for various cancers. Not wishing to die, he uses a portion of his enormous fortune to have his consciousness transferred into a younger healthier body thanks to the mysterious Phoenix Company, under the care of the calm, menacing Dr. Albright (Matthew Goode). The younger, fitter, sexier Damian, now in the physical form of Ryan Reynolds, finds that he has to live in secret, setting up shop in New Orleans as "Edward Hale", but it's worth it to have the energy and sexual stamina of a much younger man again.
From this point, Self/less makes an apparently calculated effort to explore these ideas in the least-interesting way possible. The tension of a personality trying to figure out a foreign body while exploiting that body's good looks and strength isn't nearly enough tension, apparently, which is why the film launches into an exhaustingly predictable action thriller, by which Damian discovers that Albright's promise that his new body was a lab-created blank is a lie: he is, in fact, living inside of an ex-Marine named Mark, who left behind a wife, Madeline (Natalie Martinez), and a hopelessly dear moppet of a daughter named Anna (Jaynee-Lynn Kinchen). In attempting to find these two people, who keep flashing into his consciousness as fragmentary memories, Damian/Edward/Mark inadvertently puts their lives at danger. And there follows the whole cross-country chase deal, with some gunfights and a car chase that closely resemble the gunfights and car chase in about a dozen mid-budget action films every year.
Picking apart the holes in the scenario is trivially easy, as is longing for a version of the film that actually built on its ideas, rather than used them as the pretext for a second and third act that feel like they came out of an "Popcorn Movies for Dummies" guide. But even within those limits, there's no earthly reason for Self/less to exist as such a boring slog. It entirely runs out of interesting energy once Reynolds takes over for Kingsley; the latter man's inexplicable choice of a gruff gangster accent, and his perpetually shocked and annoyed expressions, lend the film a mixture of danger and broad comedy that feels like something, even if its not at all clear that a whole movie in that mode would have been particularly successful in its own right.
Instead, we find further proof that Reynolds can't carry a movie, or at least producers and directors don't know how to use him; he has a confusing emotional arc dumped on his lap ("you fall in love with this family but not so much that you want to let her husband take over your body again except that it keeps seeming like you do, now shoot guns") and he doesn't ever once play the role like a younger version of Kingsley's character, or any sort of generic 68-year-old given a chance at youthful virility at all.
I am reminded of Bradley Cooper's Limitless: take a handsome white guy who looks like he could be a nerd in real life and drop him in a sci-fi action movie that is petrified to death of actually dealing with the implications of its concept, and watch him be unflaggingly boring. A year and a half later, Cooper was starring in Silver Linings Playbook; in 2016, Reynolds will be playing the lead in Deadpool, which looks on paper like the first project to take proper advantage of his particular skills since Adventureland. So maybe by that point, this will look like the last misfire en route to the actor finally transforming himself into a kind of movie star. But that's no help to us at this moment: all we've got is a bland action movie without more than a half-dozen striking visuals and a platonic ideal of a vanilla leading performance. Summer movies don't come any more disposable than this.
Rating: C-
Reader Comments (8)
Tarsem: Five movies in and The Fall is probably his overall best (in so much as it works even a little narratively), so I'm probably avoiding this one. (I tried watching Mirror Mirror. Yeah, not making that mistake again.)
How does this movie compare to "Seconds" (which immediately came to mind the first time I saw the trailer)?
Volvagia- I didn't dislike Mirror Mirror, but there's absolutely no question that if you didn't like that, this has even less to offer.
Frank- WORLDS away. That film is deeply curious about its sci-fi concept and anchored by maybe my favorite Rock Hudson performance. Certainly his least typical. While this is a Jason Statham movie watered down to about 10% of full strength. The similarity ends at the plot hook.
This sounds like Looper (or at least the Gordon-Levitt/Willis part of it) gone really bad.
i didn't realize that Matthew Goode was in this! but yeah, it looks terrible. I'm relatively immune to the appeal of Tarsem though people always think i would love him (given my love of eye candy) but I did like The Fall.
"he doesn't ever once play the role like a younger version of Kingsley's character, or any sort of generic 68-year-old given a chance at youthful virility at all"
I am flashing back to an episode of Angel where this kind of body switch happened, and I remember David Boreanaz going gleefully bananas with it <3
Another reason to avoid Ryan Reynolds, whom I have NEVER seen in a movie.
I loved The Fall. Loved.
THE CELL is my favourite, but I have a lot of time for THE FALL and MIRROR MIRROR. IMMORTALS at least looks good.