Movie Review: Surrogates

Bruce Willis plays Tom Greer, an FBI agent in a future where you stay home hooked up to a "stim chair" and your idealized robotic body double (your surrogate) goes out into the world feeding you data. From your chair, you control what your surrogate does and says with your mind. Sounds interesting, right? It's not. The movie doesn't work for a few reasons. The dialogue is strained and there is simply too much of it. The characters are constantly using dialogue to explain what's going on in the movie. Never a good thing. There are scenes that are so contrived you'll be reminded of Shyamalan's, The Happening (if you were unfortunate enough to have seen it). James Cromwell, the actor who played the inventor of the robots in I, Robot, plays the inventor of the surrogates in Surrogates. That goes beyond typecasting and was truly a foolish decision by the casting director. Ving Rhames provides unintentional comic relief as the Rastafarian leader of the anti-surrogate movement. The movie is based on the novel, The Surrogates, by Robert Venditti and Brett Weldelle which was published in 2005. The source material is good but the movie only plays up the mechanical aspect and misses the philosophical point. Maybe they shouldn't have rushed to get it to the screen and spent more time on the screenplay. Skip the movie. Read the book.