FILM REVIEW: Surrogates

12A • 89 mins • 25 September

Director: Jonathan Mostow

Cast: Bruce Willis, Radha Mitchell, Rosamund Pike, Boris Kodjoe, James Cromwell

Rating:

Props to this comics adap for topicality, at least. While big-screen SF increasingly mines Hollywood nostalgia for inspiration, here’s one film driven by some provocatively 21st Century concerns.

Set in a sideways present where the world’s population has retreated behind idealised synthetic identities, it’s pitched as a parable for our online age, where the pixie-winged ballerina you’re smooth-talking on Second Life is undoubtedly a morbidly obese man in a wife-beater. We’re beyond digital avatars in this world, though – the titular Surrogates are lifelike robots, hiding bleeding-edge cybernetics behind their smooth photogenic faces.

Enter Bruce Willis as a Fed, investigating a spree of Surrogate murders. Enter two Bruces, in fact – an unlined robo-Bruce rocking the kind of hair last seen on a Ukrainian boy band and a balder, grizzlier, true-Bruce, forced to emerge from the shadows to unravel the mystery.

A genuinely tantalising premise, then. Too bad the film fumbles it. Jonathan Mostow’s direction is relentlessly functional, not helped by some distinctly ugly location work and what feels like a cautious budget: unmasked, the Surrogates resemble nothing so much as Fembots, while a shot of their birthplace has all the hi-tech grandeur of a Comet warehouse. As it’s a Willis movie there’s the contractual certainty of a car chase and a helicopter smash, but the action never soars, with a climax that commits the cardinal sin of conjuring feeble drama from people jabbing at computer keyboards.

There’s none of the essential unease of Westworld or The Stepford Wives, two films that staked similar turf. Even the commentary on our Botox-fuelled age of perfection feels incidental at best. Wasting the chance to be a great, resonant SF metaphor, Surrogates ultimately proves as bland and empty as its pretty mechanical protagonists.

Nick Setchfield