Review: "Gemini Man"

It’s one thing for a character to say they’re haunted by ghosts; it’s quite another to show the ghosts. “Gemini Man” does the former while scrimping on the latter.

I’ll be straight: I was prepared to duck the screening for “Gemini Man.” It’s a busy time of year and there’s a lot of movies to pay attention to. The trailers, in which Will Smith, playing a world-class assassin who encounters a younger CGI’d double of himself, looked pretty goofy.

Digital alteration of reality continues to advance, and we’ve all seen those freaky-deaky “deep fake” videos of Bill Hader transforming into Arnold Schwarzenegger or whatnot. But the truth is it still hasn’t gotten to the point where it’s totally convincing. So I was prepared to give “Gemini” a skip.

Then I saw the creative team: Ang Lee (“Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”) directing? Two of the screenwriters are David Benioff (“Game of Thrones”) and Billy Ray (an Oscar nominee for “Captain Phillips”)? The credentials are there, maybe the film’s better than advertised?

Nope.

It’s not a bad movie by any means. It’s got lots of vigorous action scenes, including a killer one where the two warriors battle on motorcycles, with the younger one using the bike itself as a weapon. There are also exotic international locales, a sniveling villain, and other hallmarks of the spy thriller genre. In terms of action set pieces, it’s basically a low-rent Bond film.

But that’s all it is. Lee and the screenwriters (Darren Lemke is the third) make aspirations toward something deeper and more meaningful, but keep falling back on stunts and shootouts instead of exploring the main characters’ inner psyches.

Smith plays Henry Brogan, a legendary sniper for the Defense Intelligence Agency. He’s spent 30 years making impossible kill shots, dubbed AMFs -- “Adios, Mother Flipper,” or thereabouts -- such as the one that opens the picture of a terrorist getting it through the window of a speeding European bullet train. Now after 72 confirmed kills he’s ready to hang it up, citing age, fading skills and the aforementioned ghosts.

Turns out the last kill wasn’t a clean one, but cooked up by old nemesis Clay Verris, played by Clive Owen in full jowls-and-scowls mode. He runs the titular Gemini program, a quasi-military force used by governments to clean up their messes. And they’ve concluded that Henry is the loose tie that needs to be snipped.

We’ve seen this before in every spy franchise, from Bond to Bourne to Jack Reacher. Someone in the government decides the veteran killer needs to be killed, racking up tremendous deaths and expenditure of resources in the process, necessitating even more stuff to throw at the guy.

At some point I’d like to see a movie where an armchair spymaster says, “You know what? Better just leave him be.”

Gemini’s secret weapon is Junior (also Smith), who was cloned from Henry’s DNA. The young man has spent his entire life being trained by Verris to be the ultimate killer. He’s got all of Henry’s moves plus a few parkour-style bits where he bounces off walls and such. But does he have the same hidden conscious eating away at him, suggesting all his jobs may not be on the up-and-up?

As I said, the likeness is not terrible, akin to Smith during his “Fresh Prince” days. He acted out the role normally and then a younger version of his face was digitally stitched on. It works OK in fleeting shots or darkness, but when the camera has to hold in bright light, it has a very video game feel.

Mary Elizabeth Winstead plays Danny, a DIA agent sent to tail Henry who ends up becoming his capable ally. She and Henry flirt in between the firefights, while pretending not to. Douglas Hodge and Benedict Wong are old friends brought in to help out.

The dialogue is truly cringe-worthy at times, with lines such as “It’s like watching the Hindenburg crash into the Titanic.” My personal (dis)favorite is Henry waking up Danny in bed and she pulls a pistol on him. “It’s not gun time, it’s coffee time,” he purrs, handing her a brimming mug. What the…?

I was expecting “Gemini Man” to be more a psychological thriller interspersed with action scenes about two hardcases with intertwined identities, a la “Face/Off.” But it’s just a straight-up action movie featuring Old Will Smith and digitally de-aged Will Smith.

It’s garden-variety gunplay, with a Benjamin Button twist.

Reeling Backward: "Eat Drink Man Woman"

The message of "Eat Drink Man Woman" is pretty straightforward: Love and romance are as integral to one's basic subsistence as food and water.

The third film directed by Ang Lee was a huge international hit in 1994, preceded the year before by "The Wedding Banquet," and launched his filmmaking career in America the year after with "Sense and Sensibility." Lee, who also co-wrote the script, already showed a mature, humanistic approach to storytelling.

It's the tale of a Taiwanese father and three adult daughters, all living under the same roof but emotionally scattered. All have varying degrees of love trouble, even the ones who have sworn off romance.

Mr. Chu (Sihung Lung) is a master gourmet chef who's very protective of his art. In addition to his professional duties at the top local restaurant, he spends hours in his large home kitchen cooking. Every Sunday he prepares a veritable feast for the family, with a dozen courses or more.

The loving food shots are enough to set one's stomach to a high rumble, even though the food itself is mostly unfamiliar since it's authentic Taiwanese cooking. There's one shot of Chu pulling some beef spare ribs out of a simmering pot that sent me scurrying to the kitchen.

Chu doesn't allow any of his three daughters to cook in his kitchen -- even though middle daughter Jia-Chen (Chien-Lien Wu) showed a talent for it as a girl. He's further confounded by his own dying taste buds. Not only can he not enjoy his own creations, but he occasionally screws them up because he can't self-correct. He's at once prideful and dismissive of his life's calling.

"People today don't appreciate the exquisite art of cooking," Chu grouses to the restaurant manager. "After 40 years of Chinese food in Taiwan, the art is lost. Food from everywhere merges like rivers running into the sea. Everything tastes the same."

Chu is most estranged from Jia-Chen, even though he secretly harbors the greatest pride for her. She has become a top executive at a Chinese airline company. She is desperate to move out from under her father's strict control, having put down her life savings on a new luxury apartment project. She's also tempted by an opportunity to live abroad, and by a married co-worker.

If Jia-Chen's life is bursting with opportunities, oldest daughter Jian-Jen (Keui-Mei Yang) seems stuck. A plain old maid of a school teacher, she seems to have never recovered from a broken romance during college. Nearing 30 -- practically ancient for an unmarried woman in traditional Taiwan -- Jia-Chen is committed to her father and her Christian faith. A new gym teacher at her school offers a last shot at freedom, especially when mysterious love letters begin arriving on her desk.

Youngest daughter Jia-Ning (Yu-Wen Wang) is a 20-year-old student working at a Wendy's fast-food restaurant. One of her co-workers delights in torturing her sad mope of a boyfriend before she finally dumps him. Jia-Ning tries to console the sad boy, and finds herself drawn to him.

Plot-wise, there really isn't much going on. Chu and his daughters have various low-key confrontations that halt before any genuine exchange of emotional catharsis is achieved. Chu's brother Old Wen warns that he is headed for an explosion. This seems confirmed when Jia-Chen spots Chu coming out of a cardiologist's office.

There's also a neighbor with a young daughter and an old harpy of a mother. The matron, who constantly derides the institution of marriage, nevertheless appears to have marital aims on Mr. Chu. For his part, he enjoys secretly preparing gourmet lunches for the granddaughter, which brings her a great deal of popularity at school.

I can't stress enough what a culinary delight watching this movie is. Like "Julie & Julia," the food is simply gorgeous to look upon, let alone stimulating your centers of craving. Although I must observe that everyone in the movie seems suspiciously slender to be enjoying this fare on a regular basis.

"Eat Drink Man Woman" is simply delicious filmmaking. And it was but the appetizer for the great career of Ang Lee.

3.5 stars

Review: "Taking Woodstock"

I liked everything about "Taking Woodstock" except for the concert itself. Or rather, I liked the movie up until the point the music started playing.

And that's because we already know pretty much everything there is to know about the iconic "3 Days of Peace & Music" from 1969 -- the acid trips, the rolling hills filled with people sleeping and grooving, the casual nudity, playing in the mud, etc. It is literally not possible to have lived in America over the past 40 years without being inundated with these images.

What is interesting and new are the events leading up to Woodstock, which are depicted by director Ang Lee ("Brokeback Mountain") in a fresh and vibrant manner. They deal with the tiny New York town of White Lake, which suddenly found itself host to the biggest rock concert in history. Most of the townsfolk are not happy about it, and blame the two local men responsible for bringing it there.

You may have heard of one of them, Max Yasgur, the unassuming dairy farmer (played by Eugene Levy) who hosted the Woodstock concert on his land. But many people (including me) didn't know the story of Elliot Tiber (renamed Teichberg for the film), who ran a tiny motel with his parents and played perhaps the most pivotal role in the concert happening in White Lake, or anywhere.

As played by Demetri Martin, Elliot is a timid, closeted gay youngster who lives in the Big Apple but spends most of his time helping his aged parents (Imelda Staunton and Henry Goodman) run the equally decrepit El Monaco Motel. As president of the tiny local chamber of commerce, Elliot is perpetually dreaming up ways to promote the El Monaco, including an annual chamber music festival and using his barn to play host to a troupe of starving thespians with a penchant for doffing their clothes.

When Elliot gets wind that a major rock festival has been killed by the neighboring town of Wallkill, he contacts the Woodstock organizers and pitches the El Monaco to them. They reject it as too small, but make a deal with Yasgur. Soon organizers and construction guys are arriving by the dozen.

I enjoyed these scenes because they make clear what a major business venture Woodstock was -- in fact, Woodstock Ventures was the name of the company formed to put it on. The irony of an event devoted to free love being birthed entirely by people with money on the brain is delicious fare.

But once the concert starts up, the energy dissolves. Elliot wanders over to Yasgur's fields to check out the scene, and soon gets caught up in acid trips and orgies and all that.

There are a number of supporting characters, played by actors giving some adept performances. Unfortunately, they seem less like real people than contrivances of the script (by longtime Ang Lee collaborator James Schamus, based on Tiber's book).

There's Billy, a burnt-out Vietnam vet played by Emile Hirsch who keeps wading through flashbacks, and Michael Lang (Jonathan Groff), the Zen-like concert organizer who acts as if he knows something no one else does. The most artificial figure is Liev Schreiber as Vilma, a cross-dressing tough who provides security and dispenses assuring platitudes.

Elliot's parents seem like they want to be at the center of the story, but keep getting shunted to the periphery. Mrs. Teichburg has a penny-pinching mania that drives a wedge between the family, but the film never bothers to explore the source of her obsession.

Lee and Schamus should have forgotten about Woodstock, and stayed at the El Monaco.

2.5 stars