The base concept for this little sci-fi
thriller 'Vice' seems like a good one, and it should since it
liberally borrows from quite a few decent sci-fi movies made
in this past half century, but guess what… we don't care if a
movie steals. At least within the observed bounds of copyright
protections. All we care about, at the end of the day, is that
this movie found some kind of way to entertain us, but
unfortunately we had our qualms even before watching a single
of frame of 'Vice' if for only one single reason… that being
the presence of one Walter Bruce Willis on the box cover. Now
don't get us wrong, because we love us some Bruce Willis here
at the FCU but when Mr. Willis shows up in these lower budget
movies we love to watch over here, he can't even fake like he
wants to be in said movie. I mean I'm sure my man is getting a
couple million bucks or something, and it's usually for a day
or two worth of work, and most of the time the director,
usually this director Brian A. Miller, doesn't even ask him to
leave the room. Or even get out of his chair on some
occasions. But yet Bruce still looks bored as hell, just like
he did in this movie. Oh well, its good work if you can get
it.
Willis is Julian Michaels, a businessman in the near future
who has hijacked some guys artificial life technology and
taken this tech and built a virtual playground where people's
wildest dreams can come true. Unfortunately, the dreams for
these people seem to consist of gang rape, regular rape,
torture rape, choking people to death, and shooting people to
death. Usually after they've been raped. Outstanding. You see
these 'artificials' are just like real people with skin and
organs and brains and feelings and all kinds of real stuff. I
mean like, where's the fun in gang raping a robot, right? And
then after the artificial is done being brutalized, it's back
to the repair facility where they get patched up, their
memories are wiped, and they get to do it all over again the
next day. Apparently this craziness is doing bang up business
for Julian and his corporation in this awful near future.
There are some issues. One is tough cop Roy
(Thomas Jane) who has observed that for some, simply raping
fake humans isn't enough so they seep out and rape murder real
humans. Roy doesn't like that and he doesn't like Julian's
business model. More pressing is the artificial Kelly (Ambyr
Childress) who thought she was about quit her bartending job
to explore the world, but ended the day getting strangled to
death, just like she has the last umpteen times she woke up in
her apartment planning to see the world. Problem being is that
she's starting to remember this stuff which is a problem. It
becomes even more of a problem when Kelly busts free from
fantasy rape land and is running around in the real world.
This is a problem because if artificials start killing real
people, this would be bad for Julian's business.
So Kelly's running around trying to figure some things out,
she's being helped by the dude that created this tech who
designed Kelly to look like his dead wife, which seems super
unhealthy, and Tough Cop Roy has also figured some things out.
Julian Michaels has to stop all this figuring out of stuff and
people need to die. Now Julian himself isn't going out to kill
these people because that would require Bruce Willis to get
out of his chair and leave the room, which is why at some
point this action needs to come to him. I would not be
surprised if Julian Michaels dies in this movie, and I'd be
even less surprised if he dies sitting in his chair.
So this movie 'Vice' is getting beat-up pretty good about now,
and it deserves this beating for the most part because the
film is rote, derivative and maudlin, but I have nothing but
mad respect for the director of this film, Brian A. Miller.
For one, he gets to make movies for a living, which is an
awesome job to have. Secondly, he makes movies with cool
people like John Cusack, and Bruce Willis and 50 Cent and Dave
Bautista and Sonny Corleone. Third, he makes the kinds of
movies I like to watch. Unfortunately, with the exception of
maybe 'Officer Down', most of Mr. Miller's movies haven't been
all that good, and we can throw 'Vice' on that pile as well.
Yes, Bruce Willis sleepwalking through this movie is a
problem, but he really wasn't in this movie enough to sink it
all by its lonesome. You see there's this odd disconnect going
on within this film that's hard to shake. It looks slick, but
it's sterile. There's action but the action is uninvolving and
lackluster. Thomas Jane is doing his best to make up for Bruce
Willis' boredom, but the cop character he's playing is
woefully underdeveloped and his motivations murky. Ambyr
Childress is pretty as Kelly, but she too is a sterile
character stuck in a sterile environment. The one time things
got interesting for Kelly, when she went back to the tech guy
to get some 'upgrades', and we were kind of pumped because we
figured Kelly was going to do some heavy duty kung fu ass
kicking, but even that didn't materialize. And considering
this is a film that borrows so liberally from other sources,
we would've thought we would be privy to a better
narrative, but even that was undercooked.
We really wanted to like this movie. Well, we want to like
every movie, but really did want to like this one. But alas
all we got was a slick looking block of blah. That makes us
sad.
