Gemini Man (2019)

Starring: Will Smith, Clive Owen, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, and Benedict Wong
Grade: C+

At one point, old Will Smith points a gun at a young Will Smith, spouting off similarities they both share to wake up the hard-headed, younger Smith. He notes that the young Smith probably hates cilantro and what is his response?

“Everybody hates cilantro”.

What?

Summary

In Liège, Belgium, 51-year-old assassin Henry Brogan (Smith) is set to kill a Russian bioterrorist named Valery Dormov on a train, with a sniper from a faraway distance. Just before he is about to shoot, a little girl on the train stands up and stares at the bioterrorist, so Henry’s spotter Marino (E.J. Bonilla) tells him to wait. After a moment, the shot is finally clear just as the train approaches a tunnel. Right before the train enters it, Henry takes the shot and is able to kill the target by inches. Afterwards, Marino shows him the video of the hit because he was so impressed by it, but Henry has him delete it.

In Buttermilk Sound, Georgia, Henry chills at his house in a very secluded area. He’s decided to retire, so his handler Del (Ralph Brown) comes to his place to talk about it, reminding Henry he’s still the best the Defense Intelligence Agency has. Henry counters with the fact that this is a job you cannot lose a step in. If he was “six inches” off his target, the little girl would’ve been dead. He got lucky and admits it.

Later, Henry goes to the dock to rent a boat from the new boat manager Danny (Winstead). She’s nice, and they talk for a bit. After Henry mentions his bee allergy after killing one, the conversation leads to her revealing she’s going to graduate school for marine biology. Afterwards, he takes the boat to a yacht to meet former colleague and friend Jack (Douglas Hodge). After exchanging pleasantries, Jack shows him a picture of Valery Dormov, knowing Henry’s last mission was killing him. Jack tells him he was lied to and that Dormov wasn’t a terrorist. He was a molecular biologist living in the United States for the last thirty years. The file was “spiked”. Insisting on speaking with Jack’s source, Jack sets up a meeting for Henry to meet with Yuri Kovacs (Ilia Volok) in Budapest, Hungary. At the Defense Intelligence Agency in Virgina, they get word on Henry’s meeting with Jack after listening from a drone or something. Clay Verris (Owen) argues with the Deputy Director of Operations of the DIA Janet Lassiter (Linda Emond) over what to do next. She says they have a tail on Henry now that he’s hit retirement and he’ll be “contained”, but Verris argues he’s too dangerous to be kept alive and that they need GEMINI, the private military company he runs, insisting he has someone who can take care of Henry. Lassiter still refuses, so Clay gives her one last shot to not fuck things up.

Finding some audio equipment clearly planted on the boat he rented, Henry goes straight to Danny and accuses her of being an agent from DIA sent to monitor him. She denies everything and is able to answer every question hurdled towards her. Realizing he made a mistake, he offers to take her out after work as an apology, and she accepts. He meets up with her but soon after they greet each other, Henry pulls out a printout of her DIA badge. Well, her cover is blown. Despite being burned (or “toast” as she says, something that eventually becomes her nickname), they still have a pleasant conversation and get to know each other a bit more, with Danny talking a bit more about her background. Assuming she’ll be reassigned by the morning, they both say goodbye once the night ends. That night, Jack and his side girl are both killed by assassins on his yacht. Following a nightmare of being damn near drowned by his dad, Henry wakes up to an alarm on his phone. He immediately sees a team of assassins outside of his window, so he goes straight into action. He jumps into this bunker by his bed, collects his weapons, and calls Jack to find no answer. He calls Marino and tells him to get out of there, but during their conversation, he hears Marino getting shot and killed. After killing several assassins outside of his house, he goes straight to Danny’s apartment and wakes her up to question whether she knew about it. She pleads innocence and admits she would’ve told him if she knew. Since she didn’t know, this means the assassins are coming for her next.

They go to the dock. Danny is attacked by an assassin, but she’s able to kill him, as well as find out that Lassiter is behind it. Following this, Henry and Danny escape on a boat, with Henry noting his fear of drowning before driving off. The next morning, Verris chastises Lassiter on how her plan was handled. He then takes control and officially has GEMINI deal with Henry, promising to make it look like a Russian hit. As Henry and Danny wonder what the hell is going on at a beach, a small plane lands near them. It’s Baron (Wong), a former Marine and good friend of Henry’s. He offers to let Henry and Danny stay at his place in Cartagena, Colombia. They accept, but Henry notes they’re in deep shit because he thinks Jack is dead (which he is). After they fly to Colombia, Del is seen in the principal’s office at a high school because Del’s son is in trouble. Del is interrupted by a phone call from Henry who flips out on him, and rightfully so. Del is happy to hear Henry is okay and denies any involvement with everyone trying to kill him. After Del hangs up and calls right back on some random high school kid’s phone so it won’t be traced, he again insists he didn’t have involvement but tells him that GEMINI is involved, and Verris is working with Lassiter. Also, Valery Dormov was working for GEMINI “once upon a time”, so the job was for Verris. Del promises they can fix this, but he wants Henry and Danny to come back to do it, so Henry refuses.

Immediately after, Henry lets Danny in on everything and talks about how him and Baron worked in the Marines under Verris. After Verris left the military, he started GEMINI and tried to hire them both, but they refused. Baron wasn’t bothered ever again because he moved to Colombia. This was Henry’s first mistake because he stayed in the United States. At Baron’s place in Cartagena, Henry continues, saying that Verris gets billions of dollars a year to take out targets “anyway he sees fit”. GEMINI is all about off-book kidnappings, tortures, etc. Six weeks into sniper school, Verris took Henry on a boat five miles out, tied weights to his ankles, threw him overboard, and told him to tread water as long as he could, knowing Henry’s fear of drowning. He went for as long as he could but eventually drowned, with Verris saving him and telling him that after this, he was officially ready to serve under his command. After Henry, Danny, and Baron take a shot together, they all go to sleep. The next morning, Henry notices a sniper on the roof and knows he’s waiting for Henry to leave. He wakes the other two up but leaves Baron with Danny, telling him to take care of her. He leaves the house and soon after, the gunfighting begins. At one point, he is about to snipe the assassin but sees through his scope that the young man looks just like him, and it stops him from firing. The chase continues. At one point, Henry threatens to shoot him in closer quarters, asking him to not come any further, but he does, and the shooting and chasing continues all throughout the streets.

Following an exciting dirt bike race ending in a fistfight on the street, it looks like Henry is close to death. However, the police show up, scaring the younger assassin off as Henry is arrested.

Not long after, Danny and Baron get him out by (probably) faking their credentials. Since Baron’s house is burned, they go to a different spot to hide and talk things over. On a roof somewhere, Henry tells them of his intentions to head to Budapest to meet Jack’s informant, Yuri. He comes to the conclusion that the bad guys don’t want him to die because he wants to retire, they want him to die because they think Jack told him something classified, which I thought was already implied. Thankfully, Baron has a private plane (How does Baron have so much money?). As Danny tends to Henry’s wounds on the plane, she questions whether Henry ever had a kid or a long-term relationship, but he tells her emphatically this is not the case. Back in Glennville, Georgia, the young assassin that looks like Henry, referred to as “Junior”, is back at Verris’s house. Verris questions why he left Colombia when he told him to stay and await orders, but Junior wanted to talk. Junior questions how Henry knew his every move and how weird the situation felt, but after Verris hears him say that he didn’t get a good look at his face, he changes the subject and criticizes his tactics of not holding the “high ground” like Obi-Wan Kenobi. He passes everything off as fear and tells Junior to embrace it and overcome it. After referring to him as “son” and getting him some cereal, we see a picture on the table. It’s of Junior as a child, with Verris looking like his father.

This whole situation is weird, but Junior doesn’t have time to think about it as Verris sends him off to Budapest now that Henry has landed in Hungary. Even then, everyone (on both sides) is going to be looking for answers and will stop at nothing to get them. At the same time, Verris will do whatever he can to stop anything from leaking out in pursuit of his mission.

My Thoughts:

Seeing Will Smith get back into the sci-fi genre is always a welcomed sight. A lot of his best films tend to be involved with something regarding the subject. Moreover, the idea of an old Will Smith facing off against his younger self made me excited about the intriguing possibilities. I’ll admit that the trailer had me hooked when the movie first came out. This probably doesn’t mean anything, but I considered seeing it in theaters. Thankfully, I didn’t, but the fact that I considered it tells you the marketing team did a pretty good job in catching my interest. It forced me to make it a priority to watch it when it went to streaming services, albeit a low priority.

Sorry, I’m making myself laugh with this back and forth.

Gemini Man didn’t deliver like we wanted it too, but elements of the film showed flashes of what could’ve been. Of all the actors that could’ve played the main role and were considered (see the “Fun Fact” section at the end of this review), Will Smith was a very good choice to land on as the older assassin ready for retirement. After so many Oscar-bait roles, it was nice to see Smith slide back into the fun action role he used to play so well. He’s great with the fighting and the action sequences as usual, but he still carries that charisma and charm that made him a worldwide phenomenon in the 2000s. Gemini Man reminds us of the old Will Smith who was the most popular/bankable actor in the world before Dwayne Johnson took the mantle and never let go. I enjoyed the classic “aging tough guy who still shows everyone he’s still got it” type of character he plays. It’s not like he’s too old though. The character of Henry Brogan literally just retired, but he shows enough signs of aging where he doesn’t think he can perform anymore. This was an interesting thing to note for his character. He says that if he was a measly six inches off of his most recent target, an innocent young girl could’ve been killed in the crosshairs. This was enough for him to rethink everything. Del mention Henry is still at the top of his game, but the fact that he was just lucky enough not to kill a child is a pretty good reason for Henry to call it quits. Plus, “72 kills” will wear on a human being.

This was an intriguing detail to note too. Despite being a ruthless assassin called on to kill so many targets over the years, you think he would be numb to this sort of action. You think Henry would be unemotional about killing in the vein of Frank Moses in Red. In that film, Moses felt ready for retirement because he was tired of the game, but the killing was “whatever” to him. In fact, it was still treated as a release, with it being almost a necessary part of his life. He even feels sympathy for Ivan Simanov because he hadn’t killed anyone in a while. In Gemini Man, Henry feels the need for retirement because of the killing. He feels remorse even now, after all these years and all these kills. The job has gotten to him. Despite all the death, he still retains his humanity, giving us a relatable main character who is very easy to like. Sure, this remorseful hitman role isn’t setting the world on fire with originality, but it’s a surefire way for an audience to like your main character right off the bat, despite what his job entails. It was a good choice to play the role in the manner Smith does too because he could’ve gone the After Earth route and tried to suppress all of his emotions, being a closed off man who deals with an internal struggle. Thankfully, that mess didn’t inspire his performance here. Smith was likable and a cool enough character to get behind, playing the experienced veteran that knows everything very well.

The understated chemistry between Smith and Mary Elisabeth Winstead was another major positive of the film. She has a lot of personality and though she’s an agent who also has the ability to kill at will, she seems really fun to hang out with. Danny was a nice addition to this small team Henry puts together unwillingly, but a romantic angle was needed badly. The sexual tension between Henry and Danny was obvious from the start, and there are countless suggestive comments and mannerisms from the both of them that tease the whole thing. Sadly, nothing comes of it. Once Junior is brought into the picture, everything is dropped instead of the situation intensifying. With danger at every corner, and Henry’s willingness to save Danny at every turn, it felt inevitable and almost necessary. Henry even states at one point that since Junior is the younger version of himself, he’s probably attracted to her. She even smiles when she asks Henry if he himself is attracted to her. I get that Henry is 51, so she may not want to jump in his arms right away, but if it happened, would you be surprised? We shouldn’t be at all. This isn’t old ass Clint Eastwood in one of his action films from the 1990s and 2000s where he still manages to get the young woman, despite his noticeably advanced age. Smith still looks good here, showing me that a teased relationship is not unrealistic.

Whether it was intended or not, they set up the sexual tension very well too, so the logical conclusion was them getting together. We’re expecting it, to the point where I felt like a chunk of the story felt missing when nothing ever came of it. It didn’t even have to be with Henry either…

What if since she felt like Henry was too old or was put off by his “Hell no!” response when she asked if he was attracted to her (in his defense, he said it was because he’s too old now), she falls for Junior as a result? This would’ve made for an exciting and complicated subplot, adding a lot of possibilities to the somewhat predictable story Gemini Man turns into by its end. The only way this could work is if Junior was portrayed to be a little older though. They claim he’s in his early 20s, but it doesn’t seem right based off how we see him act. It felt like the characterization of Junior was off. We understand he has to be young and immature to an extent, but it was odd how emotionally immature he is for someone who only knows death and killing people. You would think he’d be more “straight to the point” and aggressive about things. However, a lot of the time, he acts like a wonderous child in situations, like he’s just been birthed. Now, he’s been on Earth for a while and has been trained to kill ever since. I could see him questioning things, but once they got him to break the first time after his interactions with Henry, it’s like they opened the floodgates. Instead of continuing the cold-blooded killer presence he would have to have considering his upbringing, he looked like he was whining, or on the verge of crying, for the rest of the movie.

When I refer to the awkwardness (and even unsettling) parts of Junior, I’m talking about moments like when Junior eats ice cream as he watches a trauma-filled training exercise, or Verris offering him cereal to eat like he’s six years old. Hey Verris, if your company makes billions and you’re responsible with feeding a young man in his twenty’s, give him a fucking steak! What a cheap prick! I understand he’s a young man, but he’s still a full-fledged adult. This is why I don’t understand why he’s got this boyishness to him, with a childlike speech pattern. When we start to see him interact with his environment more, outside of killing people, you wonder if they’re going to have some weird reveal that he has the brain of a 10-year-old or something. Thankfully, this wasn’t the case but then why all the oddball, childlike attributes? In addition, it didn’t feel right that they give Junior a move set of a prime Jet Li either. No version of Will Smith is throwing kicks like that. I don’t care if he’s a cloned soldier. Maybe he’s the perfect version of Henry, but you can still get this message across by having him fight impressively in close quarters without having to do these wild martial arts moves. Because of their decision of Junior needing to be an athletic marvel, the fighting between Henry and Junior became way too fast-paced and overdone with CGI that in some moments, the action scenes looked like borderline videogame sequences.

Also, if neither one of them have superpowers or anything like that, how in the holy fuck does Henry take a dirt bike tire to the face and get up in seconds? Adrenaline doesn’t help that much.

Will Smith essentially grew up in the public eye, right? He’s been famous for a while. It’s hard for me to not think of a young Will Smith as the young, cool, cocky, somewhat ego-driven superstar who was such a huge celebrity back in the day. It bothers me that when we are introduced to Junior, he is instead the exact opposite. He may look like the mid-90s Smith but retains nothing of what we remembered and loved him for. It was hard for me to get into the character because we know the younger version of Smith as a completely different person. I wish Junior was portrayed similar to how the persona of young Will was back then. It would’ve been a hell of a lot more entertaining, a lot less awkward, and would’ve been a much better matchup for Henry in general. Once we learn more about Junior, we know he doesn’t have a shot against Henry, and it would inevitably lead to a team-up where Junior has to learn from him. A young, cool, and cocky Smith, similar to the screen persona he had in Bad Boys or Wild Wild West, would not only be too fast for Henry but would talk shit while doing it. The only thing stopping him would be his own recklessness. Now THAT would be exciting for Henry to face.

Next, there’s the reason we came: the CGI and de-aging of a young Will Smith. In a lot of scenes, the CGI used to create the cloned Will was really impressive. Other times, it looked horrible, especially in the first scene we see Junior in all his glory, as Verris tends to his wounds. Everything depended on the lighting and the action presented, giving us an incredibly inconsistent and distracting final product. I understand this task of recreating a young Will Smith is difficult, but tough shit. You chose this story to tell and now you have to deliver on the effects because the whole movie is centered around it. It needed to look great. Unfortunately, it was so noticeably erratic, the movie suffered as a whole because my attention was drawn to the technical problems more often than not. The editing of the movie was noticeably rough for a big budget film too. You’ll notice stuff like Henry having white hair in his conversation with Del, but when the camera goes back to Henry when he responds to something, he’s got black hair. It was so blatantly detectable, I started to think it was going to play into the story somehow, or it was some metaphorical reach. Alas, it was just horrid editing, showcasing some serious continuity errors, a trend in this film that pops up a few more times.

By the way, I like that Benedict Wong is getting work, but he played the exact same role he portrayed in Doctor Strange, sans the superpowers.

There are loads of other questions that felt either lazily brought up, lazily answered, or not thought of all the way through. At one point, Del is with his son in the principal’s office for something the kid did, but it’s never revealed what the kid did. This would’ve been the perfect opportunity for a comedic moment, but the principal walks around it completely and leaves us wondering with no payoff yelling, “If you don’t do it at home, then why do you think it would be okay doing it in science class?”. Why not just tell us? If you weren’t going to say what it was, why even include those lines and tease us? When Yuri tells Henry of Verris’s plan with his lab, Henry asks why Yuri and his men don’t just send a missile to level the place. Yuri responds by saying that Henry is the missile. Admittedly, this is a great line, but it doesn’t answer Henry’s question in the slightest. Why don’t you just send a missile or bomb and end all this madness? Yuri gives no explanation whatsoever, and we’re supposed to accept this? Why even go through this whole mess? Henry’s solution would fix everything in record time! You have to give me a good enough reason as to why they wouldn’t just bomb the place! Otherwise, don’t even bring it up!

To quote Junior, “None of that shit was necessary!”.

On top of all of this, Verris makes too many good points as the villain that got me, the viewer, questioning a lot of things. During his scuffle with Junior, he wonders aloud why he didn’t clone himself. This is a great question. Why didn’t he? I didn’t even think of this until he brought it up. They should’ve omitted this line entirely because it made us question everything. This is something intriguing enough that it made me feel like it needed to be answered. Clearly, he thinks of himself as the perfect teacher and though Henry’s talents are noted, if Verris were to teach a younger version of himself, this clone wouldn’t question his authority at all. He would obey everything and still have damn good skills as an assassin. Indeed, why didn’t he do this? We don’t know because it was passed off as a throwaway line, even though this single line made us question the entire movie. On top of this, his reasoning for cloning a person was way too good, arguing that they can send a clone to do dangerous missions instead of sending someone real to war that has parents or a family that cares for them. If Verris didn’t do it in such an aggressive tone, Henry and Junior would’ve looked like they lost the argument because I wasn’t buying what Henry was selling in the heat of the moment. I looked at Verris and was like, “He’s got a point”.

Sure, Henry’s right that the clones are still technically people, but…are they?

It’s too smart of a philosophical question to be answered in a movie like this unless drastic rewrites happened to the script. As it stands, it still felt like Verris won the argument. He still needed to die for his general treatment of everyone and (probably) numerous war crimes, but in terms of the spoken argument, it still feels like he won.

Did I like the 120 fps shooting that made everything look like it was generated on a PC, with everything in focus and brightly colored and digitized? It felt different, but considering everything else I had a problem with in Gemini Man, I can pass this off as an aesthetic choice that set itself apart from everyone else. Some are going to have a jarring reaction to it though. This is a guarantee.

There was a lot more story to tell, and there was a lot more to learn about these characters, but they wasted a lot of the running time on stuff we already knew. Here’s the thing, the big clone reveal isn’t as special as they make it out to be because we saw it in the trailer. This was the whole reason we wanted to see the movie. It’s on the fucking poster. However, in the film, it takes them about forty minutes to get to the scene that establishes Junior, his look, and his relationship with Verris. A little bit after, we get the test results that confirm he’s Henry’s clone. Basically, it took us just under an hour to reveal something we already knew before the movie started. This was a serious waste of time. The “reveal” should’ve happened twenty minutes in at most. That way, we can learn more about these characters, the importance of the mission, more fighting, the inevitable team-up of the dual Will Smiths, and juicier subplots that they missed out on. This could’ve given us more time to establish Clive Owen’s “I am your father” angle too, maybe doing something more creative with that time, so he seems more interesting as a villain. The performance wasn’t bad, but the story and certain elements of the supporting characters (especially Verris) were extremely subpar. Nothing he was saying was shocking or thought-provoking. What happens in the story was exactly how we expect the narrative to go once we learn more about Junior and Verris.

We needed more to showcase the personalities involved. For instance, more bonding time with the Smiths would’ve been an excellent way in showing who their inner selves are. Plus, seeing Danny and Baron react to them and how they are different and similar would’ve made for some fun moments. To keep the tone serious in its current presentation, you could tell there were comedic moments between the two they were suppressing, despite the situation calling for it. In doing so, it really hurt the entertainment value of the film. A lot more could’ve been done to make this more exciting, more action-packed, more interesting, and whatever else. It felt like they did just enough to make things compelling but not enough to make it great. The action in the third act doesn’t reach the excitement levels from the first half of the movie, and you can see the other big reveal in the final fight coming from a mile away. They also completely missed the chance for Henry to finish things off with a cool line during the final meeting with Verris when convincing Junior not to shoot but at that point, I wasn’t surprised. Gemini Man was full of so many misfires, it felt like a film representation of a flintlock pistol.

It has an exciting buildup but ultimately, Gemini Man reverts back to the predictable story it was trying to act like it wasn’t. In terms of action movies, it was solid. Sadly, as a whole, it was still a disappointment. Considering how long-ago development began on it, you think they would’ve came out with something more groundbreaking.

Fun Fact: This movie was in development as early as 1997. At different times, Sylvester Stallone, Clint Eastwood, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sean Connery, Harrison Ford, Dwayne Johnson, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Mel Gibson, Tom Cruise, Nicolas Cage, Bruce Willis, Denzel Washington, Brad Pitt, Johnny Depp, Michael Douglas, Kevin Costner, Keanu Reeves, John Travolta, Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, Pierce Brosnan, Jason Statham, Michael B. Jordan, Idris Elba, Gerard Butler, Tommy Lee Jones, Nick Nolte, Jon Voight, and Chris O’Donnell were all attached to star at some point. Mary Elizabeth Winstead won the role of Danny over Tatiana Maslany.