Surrogates / In the future, we will never leave the house. Instead, we’ll be sitting safe at home in our “stim chair” stations, controlling robots custom-made in our likenesses. They will go out in the world doing everything we normally do in our day to day existences; work, party, sex it up, etc. This is the intriguing premise of Surrogates, a new thriller starring Bruce Willis that manages to miss every potentially exciting, titillating and thought-provoking angle and ultimately ends up being so pedestrian that you just wish it would be December 18 so Avatar would be released. Both movies employ what is basically the same device but James Cameron looks like he’s having a helluva lot more fun with the idea. Surrogates manages to reduce itself to a mid-season episode of a second-rate TV cop show.

Willis (in his first lead since Live Free or Die Hard) plays an FBI agent investigating what appears to be a murder, a rarity in this new, sedate society. A news report in the opening montage of the film mentions that the crime rate drastically fell due to the use of surrogates.

But wouldn’t the opposite be true? One would think that operating a body that can’t feel pain would open up a whole new wave of criminal anarchy and identity theft, but apparently in this world, it is not so.

And that is one of the main problems with Surrogates–you just don’t believe anything in the script. Wouldn’t it have made more sense to have your doppelganger do things for you, instead of you controlling it? You’re still mundanely going to work each day so mentally, you aren’t getting any breaks. When users disconnect from their surrogates after lying horizontal for who-knows-how-long, unlike Wall•E, they walk around no problem. One would think some form of atrophy would kick in.

The only real benefit to this lifestyle would be sex. You can get with hotties totally out of your league because your cyborg can look like whomever you want. The drawback? That chick you’re playing tonsil-hockey with is actually a “big fat dude sitting in a stim chair with his dick hanging out”–one detail the movie does get right for our corrupt social networking times.

The cast does what it can. Bruce is Bruce in his patented B-movie mode, bringing determined, unshaven grizzly-ness to his part while Ving Rhames and James Cromwell basically play themselves in their villainous supporting roles. Radha Mitchell (so good in Woody Allen’s under-rated Melinda and Melinda) plays Willis’ partner with a charismatic spunk that leads one to believe she thinks she’s in a better movie than she is.

Rosamund Pike (Die Another Day) plays Bruce’s wife, tethered behind closed doors to her computer station, refusing to go out into the real world after the death of their son. Pike does a fine enough job, but since they don’t need to look like their surrogates, wouldn’t it have been more interesting if Willis’s wife turned out to be Betty White?

By the end of Surrogates, its laughably bad FX and even dumber logistics, you realize it would have worked better as a Mike Judge or Judd Apatow comedy.

Trailer

Surrogates–Behind the Scenes