Arkansas Times by Arkansas Times

MOVIE REVIEW

Big, dumb summer fun? ‘Total’-ly.

5:00-6:30 pm best steak 2005-2012

BY DAVID KOON

f you’re male, of a certain age, and dig on sci-fi and action flicks from the golden age of big, stupid scifi and action (call it The Schwarzenvandammestallone Era), you probably have some fond memories of the 1990 version of “Total Recall,” and not just because it featured a mutant woman with three boobies. Though it was camp as only Ahnuld Schwarzenegger in his prime could deliver, complete with cheesy one liners, “Total Recall” was really ahead of its time on a deeper level, gently asking the viewer to question what is “real” in the film long before flicks like “The Matrix,” “Inception” and “Memento” took that concept fullbore. A bit of warning: It’s probably impossible to talk about the new remake of “Total Recall” without some gentle spoilers, so if you really want to see it, you’ve never seen the original, and you tend to get the red-ass if somebody breathes a word of a plot before you see a film with your own eyes, you might want to stop reading now. While there are quite a few similarities between the old and new versions of “Total Recall” (which are, in turn, loosely based on Philip K. Dick’s 1966 sci-fi short “We Can Remember For You Wholesale”), there are some striking differences, many of which actually make the new “Total” a good bit better than the original. In the new remake, Colin Farrell stars as Doug Quaid, a likeable robocop assembly line worker toiling in The United Federation of Britain after a daily commute from Australia through the center of the earth on a giant suppository/transit device called “The Fall.” In this nightmare future we’re all headed for, the depletion of resources has led to global chemical warfare, which has succeeded in destroying every habitable landmass except for Britain and Australia (sorry, Sweden!). With the world’s remaining population crammed onto these two tiny spots, the world has become divided further by the elite, wealthy ruling class in Britain — led by the devious Chancellor Cohaagen (Bryan Cranston of “Breaking Bad”) — and a filthy, multi-ethnic peasant class on the other side of the world in “The Colony.” To escape from the “Blade Runner”esque nightmare of living like rats in a continent-sized mega city, Colonyfolk have taken to going to a place called Rekall,

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‘TOTAL RECALL’: Collin Farrell stars.

which — for a fee — will give you pleasant memories of trips, fantasies or derring-do. Bored with his life on the assembly line Doug blows off stories that the Rekall process can give you brain damage and heads on over. There, he asks for the secret agent special. In the middle of the procedure, though, it’s revealed that he really IS a secret agent, then with the agents bursting in and then the killing and the shooting and the mayhem, oy! Or, wait ... did any of it happen at all? Is Quaid really a secret agent on the run, or is he a guy trapped inside his own fantasy? I won’t go much more into it for the sake of preserving the plot, but that’s the question the film asks, and in a lot more explicit terms than the original. Colin Farrell is good here as a thoroughly confused guy who is running flat-out for most of the film, never knowing who to trust and often forced to literally fight for his life against people he thought loved him. Cranston is suitably slimy as Cohaagen as well. The real stars of the show, however — as in any big, dumb summer movie — are the fairly spectacular action and the special effects, featuring a gritty vision of a cramped and worn-out future world, along with wonderfully claustrophobic chase scenes through tight spaces that look like Hell’s sub-basement (bonus: Little Miss Ta-TaTas makes an appearance as well. Twelveyear-olds rejoice). Too, there’s always that lingering, unsettling question that we deal with right along with Quaid: Is it live, or is it Memorex? If this were Oscar season, some might question whether the characters in “Total Recall” were people you could really care about, whether the plot really held water, whether it was much ado about nothing. But it’s not. It’s summer, and you have to grade on the summer curve. You have to ask yourself: Does it hold my interest? Does it excite from time to time? Does it entertain? Does it keep me from looking at the clock on my phone until the popcorn bucket is empty? My take is that the answer for “Total Recall” on all of the above is: yes. If you’re a hardcore fan of sci-fi and action, you could definitely do worse.

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ITY

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August 13-18, 2012

For more information go to ArgentaArtsDistrict.org.

participating restaurants

eight-dollar lunch twenty-five-dollar dinner argenta market 379.9980 cornerstone pub & grill 374.1782 cregeen’s irish pub 376.7468 reno’s argenta café 376.2900 starving artist café 372.7976