“Gemini Man” (2019) stars (pre-slap, beloved) Will Smith as Henry Brogan, a talented government hitman who decides to retire after his most recent hit feels off. It turns out that his instincts were correct, and the government lied to him about the target’s identity. The government decides to eliminate everyone connected to the kill so Henry decides to investigate further and is horrified to discover the truth. He was cloned!
When I saw the preview for “Gemini Man” and heard that the great auteur Ang Lee directed it, I had zero interest in seeing it. While I love Lee’s early work, Lee lost me when he turned to action. While I love action films to have a deeper meaning, the action needs to come first otherwise for me, neither works. Call me a philistine, but I wanted less beauty in the martial arts in “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” (2000), which had the best cast, and “Hulk” (2003) felt irredeemable and ridiculous. Lee found his footing with his masterpiece “Brokeback Mountain” (2005), but I was not wild about “Life of Pi” (2012). My mom will watch Smith in anything, and she does not go to the movies. I have not seen one of his films in the theater since I saw “Winter’s Tale” (2014) and was delighted to discover that he appeared in a memorable supporting role. Also this film sounded too much like “Looper” (2012), and I was not a fan. I finally prioritized watching this film because Hulu pulled it from streaming so pre-slap. I did not want it to slip through the cracks so I borrowed the DVD and waited until I could not renew it anymore before watching it with mom. We are busy people, and there is better content to watch.
“Gemini Man” was not as bad as I expected, and I preferred it to “Looper,” but it could have been better. Neither Lee nor Smith were originally attached to this film, which David Lemke conceived in 1997, but it needed some more fleshing out. A lot of people worked on it, including “Game of Thrones” David Benioff. It never seems to occur to anyone that an assassin may not be seen as a heroic protagonist. The filmmakers seemed to consider that casting Smith in the role was sufficient to classify Henry as a good guy instead of a sociopath. Smith makes it work, and the film gives him friends, but the math does not add up.
Mary Elizabeth Winstead must do a lot of heavy lifting as Danny, nicknamed Toast, an undercover surveillance operator whose assignment is to monitor Henry’s retirement and humanizes Henry. On one hand, she is the only young woman who would play the love interest and get objectified. Winstead is an action star so reducing her role to a love interest could alienate women viewers, and she is white so it could anger a lot of people who may not realize that they are miscegenation proponents. Smith and Winstead must execute this uneasy dance not ignoring her desirability, which is only for a cover story for spy shenanigans, so she gets asked out to prove her real identity and must strip to show that she is not wearing a wire. If Danny acts like any average woman, she will run the other way screaming at this split approach between dating and suspicion, but if she accepts Henry’s overtures, the movie gets to unfold, and her kicking ass is supposed to make viewers forget that she accepted a date from a weirdo who messed with her at work. It furthers the trope of you cannot trust women, and they exist to help dudes work out their shit since Danny serves that function in the film no matter how much ass she kicks. She is too young for Henry, and too old for his clone. Winstead is better than the material, and I wish that she had even more fight scenes.
I do not understand the marketing for “Gemini Man.” In the previews and the posters, it is no secret that Will Smith does double duty as Henry and his clone, Junior, but this fact does not get revealed until the middle of the film as if the filmmakers originally intended for this twist to have a Shyamalan quality. If I had not known the twist, it would have increased my likelihood of buying a ticket. Revealing this twist drained the first half of any suspense.
How does Marvel do it? They are the only ones who can use de-aging technology and make it look convincing. While the work is superb, “Gemini Man” is in the uncanny valley. If you have been watching Smith since he was a rapper, you are going to be impressed and repulsed. It felt as if “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” (1991) inspired Junior’s first action scenes. Junior is so unrelenting, and the use of a motorcycle as a weapon was terrifying. It is the best action scene in the entire film. Other action scenes pull punches at the last minute and convolute the continuity.
The clone story line is a cover story to deal with toxic masculinity in father and son relationships, but for armchair psychologists, there is an additional subtext of nurturing and reparenting your inner child, which I believe attracted Smith to this project. There were a couple of lines that sounded improvised, “Look at me, dummy.” When Brogan finds out that he has a doppelgänger, he does not want to destroy him, but save him so he can live a better life than the original. Brogan displaces their toxic father, Varris (Clive Owen, who is sadly now a harbinger of lack of quality in a movie), the head of Gemini responsible for cloning.
I wish that “Gemini Man” leaned into the racial, historical and employer stalker dynamic involved in cloning. Varris is a father figure, but he was a literal superior officer who finds Brogan simultaneously impressive and repulsive. He froths at the mouth at the prospect of killing Brogan and wants to consume Brogan’s good qualities. There is a racial subtext, a dog whistle, when he characterizes Brogan as a “mutt” and derides his lack of a father. The US has a history of taking black men in the military and experimenting on them without informed consent, but also there is a theme of wanting to control black labor without respecting the black mind that operates and creates the success of the black labor. Varris has a sick fantasy that if he could completely control Brogan and give him a white upbringing in a vacuum without friends and family, he could create a better version of Brogan. These are themes of slavery, the underbelly of adoption and the employer employee dynamic of pet or threat. Remember Smith was not always attached to this project so I have no idea if these themes were intentional or evoked accidentally because of the casting, but the sci fi/horror aspect could have built upon these themes and made the movie better. “Get Out” (2017) homages do not have to be photocopies of the originals.
When does Benedict Wong stop playing sidekick? I want to see him in a starring role.
“Gemini Man” is ntertaining, jet setting and action packed, but not as textured and timeless as it could have been.