The tagline asks, 'What is The
Anomaly'. While that's cool and all, I'm not sure the
movie even asks this question, much less answers it, but it is
the name of the movie so I guess we have to roll with
it. What we have with 'The Anomaly' is a Britishy
Sci-Fi-ish movie from director / star Noel Clarke who does so
much stuff that I wonder how the young man finds time to
sleep. And he's like forty or something so he's not even
that young anymore. But whatever, the question that is
asked would be is 'The Anomaly' any good? Well, no… not
really. But we kind of liked it anyway. Because as
you well know, a movie does not necessarily have to be good
for us to enjoy it.
Ryan (Clarke) wakes up in cargo truck with a kid chained to
one of the walls. Ryan finds this odd. But Ryan is
a solid character and once the truck stops, Ryan frees the kid
and they take off running, hotly pursued by some mercenary
looking type characters. Ryan's not quite sure who or
what he is, but he knows he can kick some ass Jason Bourne
style, and he lays those cats out, while also being pursued by
a third man we will know as Harkin Langham (Ian
Sommerhalder). What Ryan doesn't know is that this
consciousness he is experiencing is short lived, and he will
also know that one of the enemies he's running from is
himself. Weird? Maybe, but it's an anomaly.
Not really, but we had to squeeze it in somewhere.
This will become a recurring theme for Ryan, waking up for a
few minutes, piecing together a clue here and there, usually
getting into some kind of brutal fist fight, more times than
not with this Harkin Langham character, before blacking out
again.
During one of Ryan's conscious
regaining moments he finds himself in quite the compromising
position with a beautiful prostitute, choking her near to
death. Again, choking prostitutes is not the kind of
behavior Ryan would normally engage in, so he immediately
ceases and desists… though
I'm thinking I would've stopped the choking,
because that's so not cool, but since she has been paid for
maybe go ahead and finish what has been started. But
that's just me. This prostitute is Dana (Alexis Knapp)
and by this time Ryan has figured that while he is out,
somebody else is controlling his body, and he thinks he knows
who this someone is and he would like Dana the super-hot
prostitute to help him out. Because prostitutes in
movies are almost always super-hot.
Of course the problem for Ryan remains, he only has a limited
amount of time before he blacks out again, slowly putting the
pieces together in his limited conscious time, until he gets
the whole picture. It's not a good picture either.
We are talking about World Domination, end of Freedom as we
know it type of picture. And only the man who can stay
conscious for ten minutes a time can help. And the hot
prostitute who has an awful lot of come in handy type skills,
considering she's just a prostitute.
So while I did end up enjoying the time we spent sitting
through 'The Anomaly' there are some semi-legitimate reasons
we can't really call it a good movie. For instance, this
is a film that has a plot that is darn near
incomprehensible. The core of the story is pretty
simple, as it usually is with almost all these stories that
have scattershot narratives, that being that our hero has to
stop a bad guy from doing a bad thing, but since we are stuck
with Ryan piecing the narrative together in basically two
minute intervals, actually breaking down what's really
happening and how this is all taking place is an exercise in
futility. The basics are simple, but once we get into
world domination, good luck with that. We could ask why
does Ian Sommerhalder's character have such awesome Kung Fu
skills to go along with his PhD, but we won't ask
that. We could ask why the evil people, who are
all world class scientists, haven't figured out the time
intervals between Ryan regaining consciousness, when the
pretty prostitute figured it out in about a day. But we
won't ask that. We could mention that the near
futuristic setting is almost completely a non-issue in this
movie and that at some point the evil people should recognize
that Ryan is far more trouble than he's worth and maybe should
try doing this evil thing they are doing with someone else.
But while the dots never completely connect in this movie, it
still looked good, it had goo gobs of action and the majority
of this action was well shot by director Clarke… though I'm
not too sure the director's reliance on Slo-Mo was the best
editing decision… but it still looked kind of cool. I
also liked how the director tried to make the prostitute
character relevant. Sure she wore next to nothing on
most occasions, and maybe this over developed woman should buy
a t-shirt and panties not designed to fit an eight year old
girl, but when the rubber hits the road, she has a lot of
skills… gun handling, psychological, surgical… she may be
stacked, but she's stacked in the brain too.
Still don't know what 'The Anomaly' is, and the movie is a
little silly, and has a fractured narrative, but it had enough
of a slick presentation and action for us over here to enjoy
it. Speaking only for myself of course.
