Film review: Bruce Willis seems disinterested in ‘Vice’
You know the film distribution business has been undergoing a sea change when an action film with Bruce Willis is opening on a handful of screens, with only one in the Los Angeles area (AMC’s Burbank 8). Even more telling is that it’s showing up on VOD the same day.
In director Brian Miller’s science-fiction film “Vice” — certain to attract a handful of careless viewers intending to see “Inherent Vice” — Willis plays Julian Michaels. If you have wax in your ears, you might mis-hear the first use of his name and think they’re talking about a female fitness personality, which would, of course, be an interesting stretch (as it were) for Willis.
The opening sequence is a high-octane bank robbery, which ends with a freeze-frame modeled on the famous last shot of “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” The camera pulls back, as Michaels explains to us that it’s all a harmless fantasy, courtesy of Vice, his fabulously expensive pleasure dome. It’s essentially Las Vegas, satisfying not the urge to gamble, but rather the urge to act out violent impulses.
This is all thanks to the development of robots/droids/replicants/whatever-your-favorite-synonym-is. The real live customers mingle with very convincing fake humans, who can be shot, strangled, folded, stapled, and mutilated without guilt. They react realistically enough for a sadist to get his freak on, but damaged parts can be easily replaced and memories erased. (Actually, in hard-drive terms, the memories aren’t erased, just deleted.) After all, they’re not people, right?
Or are they?
One night Kelly (Ambyr Childers), a pretty blonde bartender, starts having a montage of death flashbacks. She escapes into the night while trying to figure out what and who she is.
This attracts the attention of Roy (Thomas Jane), your basic Cop Who Does Things His Way. Roy is convinced that the violence inside is increasing the violence outside, and is devoted to putting Vice out of business. Unfortunately, he is frustrated at every turn by Michaels’ political clout.
Most of the rest of the film tracks Roy, who is tracking Kelly, who has teamed up with Evan (Bryan Greenberg). Meanwhile, Michaels’ thugs are tracking all of them.
What is missing in this equation? The action and the film in general have a whole lot of Childers and Jane and Greenberg and Johnathon Schaech (as the head thug) — but not very much of Willis. All his scenes are indoors and add up to (generously) 15 minutes of screen time; it’s hard to imagine he was around more than a few days. Worse yet, he appears unengaged, an attitude that can’t help infecting the audience.
The setup and the story are almost identical to Michael Crichton’s 1973 directorial breakout, “Westworld,” but Childers doesn’t arrive with the kind of iconic baggage that Yul Brynner brought to that film.
The production design and cinematography seem to aspire to the “Blade Runner” style, with everything looking bluish. It creates a nice mood, but that’s not enough to compensate for its overly familiar content.
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ANDY KLEIN is the film critic for Marquee. He can also be heard on “FilmWeek” on KPCC-FM (89.3).