Prompted by wonderment about what else Kathryn Bigelow has done beyond fluffing the military (The Hurt Locker (2008), A House of Dynamite (2025)). Mostly written by James Cameron (tidied by Jay Cocks) as a high-concept scifi riffing on the Rodney King incident in Los Angeles... and still leaning heavily on a lot of hardware. The brain hacking/virtual reality angle, the Bladerunner badlanding of L.A., the Roboocop police brutality are pure 1980s cyberpunk. The dinky TDK CDs that carry the damning recorded experiences, the millenarianism, the grungy, exclusive nightclubs and soundtrack (Tricky's reworking of Karmacoma, Skunk Anansie), the Total Recall are pure 1990s. Ralph Fiennes, looking so young and winning and much like Bradley Cooper, leads as a sort-of Johnny Mnemonic vendor of experiences with a fatal obsession with Juliette Lewis who has run off with Michael Wincott. (Her acting is perhaps in line with the conceit but not with that of the other actors.) Angela Bassett (looking fabulous) and Tom Sizemore (what was with that hair) play his supportive buddies, rusted on, handy in a fight. Bizarrely Vincent D'Onofrio and William Fichtner have almost no lines, squandered as Terminator cops who commit the original plot point.
I didn't enjoy the restless, giddy camera very much. The soundtrack is obtrusive but works well as a time capsule. The maximalist set-piece scenes are effective in themselves. There's a relentlessness to most of it that is its own kind of tedium. Expertly assembled.
Roger Ebert: four stars. Vintage 1940s noir. The plot has a few issues. Janet Maslin: "explores [...] corruption so avidly that it happens to illustrate the same runaway sensationalism it condemns" — much like Natural Born Killers (1994). IMDB trivia.
