This is some straight-up B-grade junk

Ben Kingsley in Self/Less
 
Few directors have received as consistently mediocre plaudits as Tarsem Singh. A prolific commercial and music video director (he’s the guy behind the “Losing My Religion” video), he made his directorial debut with The Cell, a visually sumptuous but narratively inept thriller. Singh followed that with a series of movies that were essentially received in exactly the same way: applauded for their visuals, decently profitable but beloved by no one. After a couple of large scale blockbusters, Singh takes it down a notch with the junky B-grade thriller Self/Less, a hodepodge of thriller elements that barely even gives Singh any opportunities to trot out the souped-up, nightmarish visuals that have become his stock in trade.

Damian Hurt (a very blinky Ben Kingsley) is one of New York City’s most powerful real-estate magnates — he’s fabulously wealthy and successful, but it’s all about to go to shit. Hurt has been diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer that has left him with less than six months to live. Hurt learns of a procedure called “shedding,” wherein a person’s mind and soul are transferred into a healthy new body. He ponies up the $250-million required for the surgery and finds himself in the body of Ryan Reynolds, but what was originally sold as a “new” body grown in a lab turns out to have more sinister origins. Hurt has been transplanted into the body of a deceased veteran from St. Louis and needs to take pills to quell what he’s told is interference but actually turns out to be the deceased’s memories creeping into his own conscience. Wracked with guilt over the wrongful takeover of the man’s body, Hurt tracks down the man’s wife (Natalie Martinez) with Dr. Albright (Matthew Goode) and his goons trailing close behind.

There’s a lot of potential to be explored in this premise. There are tons of ethical landmines that could make for interesting character conflict, but the script is more concerned with parsing the relatively simple structural implications of the body switch. Once Hurt decides that he feels bad being in a body that had a previous life, the film devolves into a series of stock action scenes. Cribbing from films like Looper and the Bourne series, Singh brushes past the actual psychology of the characters to focus on propulsively generic action scenes instead. Very little of the film is actually imprinted with Singh’s trademark opulent visual style; even the flashbacks (ostensibly the element that Singh could’ve gone most crazy with) are little more than a couple of filters slapped onto scenes of Reynolds, Martinez and their daughter gallivanting in the park.

That’s not to say that there isn’t some enjoyment to be gleaned from Self/Less. Tarsem’s visuals aren’t particularly opulent and Tarsem-esque, but he does manage at least one night-time highway chase scene that reminded me in a way of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford in its moody, foggy atmosphere. It’s also bizarrely enamored with flamethrowers as efficient manners of dispatching — the kind of idiosyncratic detail that the film needed more of to escape its generic prison. Were this a vehicle for a B-movie action star like Cuba Gooding Jr. or Jean-Claude Van Damme, it might be celebrated for its stylistic flourishes and few idiosyncrasies in a world where such things are often a rare commodity. As an effort by a director who seems to consistently fall short of the public’s expectations, though, it’s more than just disappointing: it’s lazy, and Tarsem Singh never seemed lazy before. ■
 
Self/Less opens in theatres on Friday, July 10. Watch the trailer here: