Surrogates (2009)

It’s hard to be a Bruce Willis fan. I’ve liked the guy, on screen and off, all the way back to his Moonlighting days. When the circumstances are right, when he has a good script and a talented director to work with, Bruce commands the screen and his audience — especially in such classics as Twelve Monkeys, Pulp Fiction, and the first Die Hard. He’s also very good in occasional supporting roles (especially as the abusive husband in Mortal Thoughts) and comedies (he held his own against Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn in Death Becomes Her). But between his more laudatory credits, he’s also starred in such forgettable titles as Striking Distance, Mercury Rising, and Hart’s War. His latest effort, Surrogates, unfortunately belongs in the latter group.

Surrogates treads similar ground as the recent (and terrible) film Gamer, but does a somewhat better job of exploring the virtual reality concept at its core. Director Jonathan Mostow and his scriptwriters, who previously worked with robots in Terminator 3: Rise Of The Machines, swiftly summarize their exposition during the opening credits: The rapid technological developments in both robotics and brain/computer interfaces have led to the creation of android “surrogates” who interact with each other in the outside world, working, driving, dancing, and much more, all while their human operators are safely ensconced in their homes, connected by brain-scanning headsets and goggles, experiencing life almost entirely by remote control. This technology has become so popular that 98 percent of the world’s population use these surrogates for their daily lives.

Racism is supposedly a thing of the past, as people can change their surrogate’s appearance however they wish. Likewise, crime and disease have disappeared almost entirely, though I found it hard to believe that the popularity of robotic surrogates would lead to the eradication of germs, viruses, and other health issues that would surely plague this population of virtual couch potatoes (and if crime is virtually eradicated, why are there so many cops and FBI agents still around?). The surrogates seem to be very solidly constructed and capable of absurd leaps beyond the laws of physics, while their operators are protected by a fail-safe device from any direct harm. That’s the theory anyway, until a straggly-looking “meatbag” (human) named Strickland (Jack Noseworthy) zaps a few surrogates with a fancy ray gun, not only causing the surrogates to fry their glass eyeballs and identity chips, but also killing their remotely-connected human operators.

Bruce plays FBI Special Agent Tom Greer, who sports an odd-looking blond hairpiece and lots of pancake makeup as his surrogate. (The most significant visual indicators of the surrogates are their perfect, blemish-free skin and their generally determined walking strides. If that description sounds weak, it’s not any more compelling to actually see; it often feels like they cheaped out on the surrogate visuals.) Greer and his partner Jennifer Peters (Radha Mitchell) discover that one of the zapped operators is the son of the man who invented surrogates (James Cromwell).

Greer’s pursuit of Strickland and his ray gun leads him into a “reservation” of thuggish humans who reject surrogacy and ban all technology (much like those “tea party” folk currently in our midst), led by a dreadlocked doomsayer known as “The Prophet” (Ving Rhames). Greer’s experiences within the reservation amplify his own growing disdain for surrogacy, particularly since his wife (Rosamund Pike) is so hooked she rarely comes out of her room. Well of course, she and her husband have grown distant since their kid died sometime in the past — gratuitously so, as this detail adds nothing to the plot and serves no purpose other than to make the parents look sympathetic, and to allow Bruce Willis to look grizzled and mopey when he’s playing the human version of Greer.

After the background is hastily established, the movie soon devolves into a typical crime investigation drama, only with robots and lots of video screens everywhere. Cliches abound, such as the crusty-yet-benign FBI superior who takes the lead cop/actor off the hot case, the fat and dumpy-looking computer geek who knows how to save the world, and the ruthless industrialist who gives the “Before I Kill You, Mr. Bond” speech to Our Hero before he croaks. And as much as I want to like the guy, Bruce sleepwalks through this performance, both as human and surrogate, using that same thousand-yard stare and morose, guilt-ridden demeanor he exhibited in The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable. That act may make his characters seem deep and introspective, but a little of it goes a long way, and it gets boring and tiresome to watch after a while. The director tries to compensate for this by overscoring many of his scenes, even over bits of dialogue and moments that aren’t really dramatic at all.

By the time Surrogates reaches its weak, laughably depicted climax, there’s been such confusion over who is operating which surrogate, and who is working for whom, that the presence of Bruce Willis may save people on-screen, but he can’t rescue the audience from boredom. Maybe I should give Bruce the benefit of doubt; after all, an actor is a surrogate himself, representing the words and lines in a script, so he’s only as good as the material he has to work with. As for this movie, unless you’re a “die-hard” fan of Bruce Willis or science fiction, my advice is to send your own surrogate to see it for you.