***Gemini Man Spoilers Below***
Will Smith stars opposite himself in Ang Lee’s newest action-thriller, Gemini Man. It’s a film with a lot of flaws (the least of which being that it was written in part by David Benioff, one half of the duo who ruined the final season of Game of Thrones) however, it manages to overcome a lot of those flaws in its last thirty minutes.
The film follows Smith as Henry Brogan, a seasoned assassin for the US government on the eve of his retirement. But, the job we see Brogan on in the film’s opening minutes puts him in the crosshairs of a very dangerous man named Clay Verris with an assassin of his own: a younger clone of Brogan known only as Junior. On the run from himself with little help, save for some old war buddies and a young new agent named Danny, Brogan tries desperately to stop Verris from taking the cloning any further while trying to save Junior from making the same mistakes he did.
So, right upfront, Gemini Man is a complicated movie. It’s not bad but, it’s nowhere near the best movie I’ve seen this year. The plot is somewhat of a slog and its equally convoluted as it is paper-thin. The performances across the board are all over the place. In some scenes, lines are delivered with the intensity and sincerity of the best Mission Impossible entries. But, in other scenes, it feels like the actors are simply reading off cue cards just out of view of the camera like a bad SNL skit. Ang Lee is at the height of his powers as an action director, masterfully presenting even the simplest fight scenes. But the scenes in between the action are mostly stilted and awkward to watch.
Despite all that, everything tightens up in the last 30 minutes and Lee delivers a wildly compelling finale. The performances don’t falter, the set-pieces are epic, and the story beats hit surprisingly hard considering the soft punches thrown across the first hour and a half. The final showdown when Brogan and Junior take on the third super-clone is as much an incredibly meaningful character moment as it is a bombastic and expertly choreographed three-way fight. Then, moments later when Brogan takes the gun from Junior to kill Verris, you actually feel the valley of emotions between the two versions of Smith’s character. AND, to top it all off, before he dies Verris makes a few really good points about the cost of war that clarify his perspective in a really challenging way.
Despite flaws aplenty, and a hard to follow, stop-and-start narrative, Gemini Man rises to the occasion in its final act. It won’t be for everyone and isn’t a traditional ‘turn your brain off’ action movie because of that convoluted plot. If you can buy in and stick around to the end though, I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised by the way the action, writing, and performances all deliver on the promise of the film’s high-minded concept.
Gemini Man is in theaters now.
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