Total Recall Review

This Recall remake needs a redo.

Full spoiler-free review by Isaac Handelman

The black and white color scheme, identical nature and godawful aim of Total Recall’s robotic police force, or “synthetics”, immediately call to mind the Stormtroopers of Star Wars; if only 2012’s Total Recall remake packed the necessary ingenuity to back up its admittedly intriguing premise would we have anything near the level of the iconic 1977 sci-fi masterpiece. That’s not the case. What’s presented here is so utterly faceless, so painfully generic that it’s oftentimes difficult to realize that the film is still reasonably entertaining.

This Total Recall takes a detour from Mars and sets itself entirely on Earth, where chemical warfare has rendered most of the planet’s land uninhabitable. The only livable portions remaining are the United Federation of Britain and the landmass once known as Australia, now dubbed simply “The Colony”. Colin Farrell takes center stage as Doug, an assembly line worker with a growing discontent towards his benign lifestyle. Soon enough, he visits Rekall, a company which promises to implant Doug with artificial memories of the exciting life he so craves. Midway through his treatment, he’s ambushed by security forces and promptly told he’s a spy named Hauser serving this one evil guy, but he’s actually a double agent who left his future self a message in case he got caught in the past to make sure he remembered that he’s actually serving this other guy, and so on and so forth chugs Total Recall’s convoluted narrative. The abridged version: Hauser is tasked with derailing the plans of corrupt Chancellor Cohaagen, who plans to eradicate The Colony of its inhabitants to expand the UFB, putting him in control of Earth’s only sustainable climate.

Though the setting is very different, Total Recall’s plot is actually virtually identical to that of the 1990 film of the same name. It obviously took a commendable amount of creative process to whip up the film’s new setting, and it pays off to an extent. An expedition to Mars and the inclusion of mutants in today’s blockbuster cinema landscape would surely not fly, and this diversion from the source material does nothing to detract from the overall experience at hand. Unfortunately, the overall experience at hand doesn’t have much going for it to begin with.

The biggest problem here is Total Recall’s complete lack of emotional depth. The film flirts with poignancy but never achieves it. This isn’t necessarily at the fault of the actors, who do fine with what they’re given, but with the narrative itself. We’re given no clear reasons to accept Hauser as the protagonist; he’s not hostile, but he’s not particularly likable. He’s not a hardened soldier or a sleek, suave, super-spy. He’s just this guy who’s tasked with saving the world, and outside of that his character lacks any sort of depth or development throughout the entire runtime. 

The same’s mostly true with the supporting cast surrounding him. Performances are acceptable all around, if not stellar, with one notable exception: Bryan Cranston plays a rock solid Cohaagen, emanating an unmistakably imposing aura and stealing every scene he’s in. In fact, I found myself rooting for his character, and not Hauser, during the final battle, simply because he was the cooler character. Cooler than the main protagonist. Whoops.

None of this is to say Total Recall is boring. It’s quite difficult for a film to be boring when it’s this breathless and chock full of such marvelous visual effects. Whether he’s whisked along for a high speed chase on a futuristic freeway or participating in a zero-G shootout, Hauser's activities are rarely dull, whilst completely lacking in tension thanks to the fact that it’s difficult to care what happens to any of the characters onscreen. 

In fact, the few genuinely suspenseful scenes contained within the film are ripped almost directly from the 1990 original, deflating any sense of tension for anyone who’s seen that version. Despite what the trailers may have you believe, you’ll never be questioning “What is real?” as you did all throughout the Schwarzenegger version. That’s the case for many elements of the film; it seems that screenwriters James Vanderbilt and Kurt Wimmer were content with simply changing the film’s setting and leaving the majority the elements contained therein largely intact, whilst draining them of most of their intriguing aspects and adding in a host of forgettable action sequences and a few futile attempts at emotional depth.

Total Recall has some genuinely solid elements going for it, but most of these facets are carbon copies of events which transpired, to greater effect, in the original. Most of the new content here, excluding the creative new setting, is thoroughly bland. Sometimes it’s easy to forget about a film’s problems thanks to its slick action or big-budget dazzle. The situation for Total Recall is almost the exact opposite. It’s so generic in its execution that it’s all too easy to forget that it’s also a reasonably good time. That’s a problem. Ultimately, a few positive aspects aren’t enough to redeem this clunky, misguided, incoherent remake. Though Total Recall is not nearly bad enough to warrant erasing it from my memory, I definitely wouldn’t mind a trip to Rekall for some recollections of a better remake -- or a simple viewing of the far superior original.

Final Score: 

4.0/10

“Poor”