Director: Jonathan Mostow

Runtime: 88mins

Surrogates has an intriguing premise. In its near future everyone has access to robot versions of themselves they can control from the comfort of their home VR set-up – beautiful, ageless surrogate bodies that never die in car accidents, catch the flu or get pimples. When somebody figures out a way to destroy the surrogates and simultaneously kill their users, FBI Agents Greer (Bruce Willis) and Peters (Radha Mitchell) are no longer safe using their superhuman replacements to track down the killer. You might expect the movie to spend more than five seconds dealing with Greer’s anxiety at having to step outside in the flesh for the first time in years, but Surrogates fails to follow through on its most interesting ideas time and again.

It attempts social commentary, clearly trying to say something about people today (its future is resolutely unfuturistic, with the same phones, computers and clothes) with these exaggerated chair-bound characters who experience the world through perfect, fake avatars. Unfortunately it’s clumsy and obvious with that commentary. People aren’t who they say they are – the sexy girl is really a fat dude on a couch, what a surprise – and Greer’s one-dimensional distant wife, Maggie (Rosamund Pike), doesn’t relate to him when he’s not using his surrogate. Beyond this obvious stuff, there’s little extrapolation of what the future might be like. We see a tantalising glimpse of a war fought essentially by action figures, but again it’s never developed or followed through.

The mystery itself turns out to be nonsensical, with laughable technobabble straight out of Independence Day to explain how the murderer kills people and some incredibly obvious twists. What works – and it’s the only thing that works – is the contrast between the Hollywood-beautiful surrogates and the wrinkled and unfit real people who control them. Bruce Willis, balding and wearing a dressing gown, versus Bruce Willis with a wig and a smooth tan. Willis plays Greer’s surrogate like one of his earliest action hero roles, stiffly gung-ho, and Greer the man as crotchety and flawed like in those other movies where he acts more.

The tautly good-looking young people who fill the world don’t seem unremarkable at first since that’s how most movies look, but when Willis starts blundering through them in the flesh the inauthenticity suddenly becomes stark and obvious. Apart from that, there’s nothing in Surrogates that Blade Runner didn’t do better.

*

JODY MACGREGOR

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