Mind/Body: SELF/LESS

Self/Less starts with Ben Kingsley as a New York real estate magnate filled with regrets as he’s dying of cancer. It ends with Ryan Reynolds playing a rattled everyman puzzling over an existential mystery rapidly devolving into a chase-based thriller. They’re playing the same person. The connection between these two performances and the situations in which they find themselves hinge on a sci-fi hook. The movie gets some good heady tremors out of its body-swapping, mind-hopping’s occasionally fascinating disjunction. The two halves don’t quite make a whole, both within and outside the world of the film, which makes for a movie as interesting as it is flawed.

Kingsley’s performance is mannered, twitchy, moving deliberately and carefully through business dealings with an old partner (Victor Garber) and thwarted attempts to reconnect with his estranged daughter (Michelle Dockery). All the while he’s struggling through choked coughing, a symptom, we’re to understand, of the terminal cancer eating away inside him. A suave bespectacled black market scientist (Matthew Goode) offers him a way out. Why not fake his death, get inside a whirling modified extra-magnetized CAT scan contraption, and transmit his mind into a younger body, held in stasis just waiting for a consciousness? It seems too good to be true, but worth a try. He wakes up as Ryan Reynolds, losing in the process the personality we saw before.

Here’s the central disjunction at work. Reynolds’ performance doesn’t match up with Kingsley’s. In a body swap scenario, shouldn’t we be able to peer into one actor’s face and see the other’s character? That’s not the case here, but Reynolds is doing somewhat interesting work, albeit of a different sort. He’s never looked more like a freshly birthed calf, stumbling with a dumbfounded look on his face as he emerges an old man in an unfamiliar younger body. At first he’s happy to be without the burden of his old life, suddenly healthy and vital again with unlimited resources offered by having a fortune carefully squirreled away for his new identity. But of course a problem quickly arises. He has seizures, hallucinations, and is prescribed pills to take until the side effects go away. Wouldn’t want his transplant to fail, after all. This isn’t a Freaky Friday or Face/Off switcheroo. There’s no going back.

This is of a piece with director Tarsem Singh’s usual interest in people inhabiting others’ lives and stories, through magic (Mirror Mirror), myth (Immortals), imagination (The Fall), or technobabble (The Cell). It’s also full of echoes of John Frankenheimer’s 1966 film Seconds, with which it shares a central premise, if not its existential dread. But Self/Less is also Tarsem’s least visually interesting film, putting aside his usual go-for-baroque design for workmanlike thriller framing and mechanics. You can see flashes of his visual brilliance in the old man’s gold-plated apartment, and in the eerie plastic-draped makeshift medical center at which the operation takes place. But otherwise the screenplay by brothers Alex and David Pastor offers few opportunities for fantastical imagery beyond hallucinations that warp and distort, turning the picture into something like a wobbling bowl of gelatin filled with flash-frames.

There are interesting ideas here about the nature of identity, but also income inequality, especially as we see Kingsley’s extravagant lifestyle and learn the reason Reynolds had a body ready to be hijacked by a new man. Things aren’t as antiseptic as the mysterious underground doctor led them to believe. (What a shock.) But the film doesn’t dig into these headier ideas, content to let Reynolds adopt a vaguely pained expression as he’s forced to run, jump, punch, and shoot his way to a selfless conclusion. He picks up some sidekicks, a woman (Natalie Martinez) and her adorable daughter (Jaynee-Lynne Kinchen), who operate as an externalized source for confusion and emotion he’s not allowed to express, and in the process become people much easier to root for.

I found myself trying to think around the blankness in the middle of what is otherwise a good idea. I kept looking to see flashes of Kingsley’s performance in Reynolds, but alas, I could not. A pivotal climactic scene requires an understanding of whether or not the old man’s mind is still operating, and, reader, I still didn’t know even after he said the answer out loud. This movie is a good example of an intriguing concept that never quite finds its footing. Tarsem directs smoothly and competently as the plot’s gears turn. But the whole thing comes up empty. I was interested, but never invested, as the distancing hollowness at its center grew.

Boys in Blue: END OF WATCH

In many ways a fairly standard cop movie, End of Watch follows two Los Angeles policemen through harrowing shifts in South Central, cutting glimpses into their personal lives between the episodic job-centric moments. That’s not a whole lot more than what you’d get on, say, an episode of the far-too-little-seen TNT show Southland, but this film differentiates itself by being violent and aesthetically muddy. It starts with the pretense that what we’re seeing is shot on consumer-grade video by the two men as part of one’s night school project. That’s dropped soon enough, though, hopping into conventional wobbly-cam style that still jumps into subjective shaking footage from time to time. The weaving, spinning camerawork charges right into every dangerous situation, moments that are filled with dread as sudden bloody messes can crop up around every corner.

Written and directed by David Ayer (he wrote Antoine Fuqua’s electrifying cop thriller Training Day, for which Denzel Washington won an Oscar), this film sticks to a ground level point of view. It’s narrow, filled with characters that are barely more than cliché on the page, but this visceral B-movie burrows into the chemistry between the two leads in a satisfyingly casual way. It’s convincing and occasionally riveting. The two cops at the center of it all are played with nice commitment from Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Peña, who joke with each other commiserate about women, and tense up heading off on a new call. Ayer’s writing and the actor’s total ease in their roles leads to an absorbing sense of what it must be like to go to work each day not knowing if you’ll have a dull day of office hijinks and hanging out with a friend or if you’ll be in a situation where you’ll be wondering about the next horrible thing you’ll be witnessing.

It all seems scary and tense to me, but as two cops driving every day through rough neighborhoods, they’re kind of used to it. Though there are drive-by shootings, missing kids, fires, murders, and cops and criminals alike jostling for turf, this is essentially a hang out movie. We follow Gyllenhaal and Peña as they drive around, the camera sitting on the dashboard, pointing back at the two of them. They talk and joke and drive, waiting for the next call to action. They’re funny without being overwritten, flawed in relatable, human ways without becoming fascist monsters, crooked cops, or overzealous frat boy policemen. They’re just two ambitious, but unhurried, guys trying to do their jobs. They have fun being with each other, but they take their jobs seriously.

When they’re not working, we see their personal lives. Gyllenhaal’s sweet on his latest girlfriend (Anna Kendrick) while Peña and his wife (Natalie Martinez) are getting ready for the birth of their first child. There’s an instantly sympathetic portrait of duty and matter-of-fact romance in these scenes, a sense that these men are as committed to their relationships at home as they are to their relationships on the job. In addition to strong performances from the leads and their significant others, the film is much benefited by a supporting cast of co-workers (Frank Grillo, America Ferrera, David Harbour, and Cody Horn among them) that can quickly sketch in professionalism and world-weary banter that helps makes this world feel grounded. There’s a sense of reality to the way these characters behave and interact for which all the handheld camerawork in the world can’t substitute.

Unfortunately, Ayer stumbles on his way to a conclusion. Though entertaining and involving throughout, the episodic nature with discrete, unrelated moment police business, eschews a natural endpoint. Creating one can’t help but feel forced. Ayer has threaded throughout the picture a severely malnourished parallel story about dehumanized gang members who scowl and rant in Spanglish and glower at authority. Unlike the kindness with which the leads are drawn and the sympathy with which the somewhat-clichéd supporting characters are fleshed out, these criminals are cut-and-dried bad to the bone. It makes for a sense of dread that imbues the film’s final moments with white-knuckle sensation, but the visceral moment feels a little empty. It’s the emptiness of a promising movie ending in a conventional shootout.

That’s indicative of the whole experience, though. Ayer has created a film content to do routine things competently rather than stake out new territory of its own, serving up cop movie cliché with slight shadings through tense vignettes and capable acting. The film is often effective and affecting despite considerable drawbacks. It’s more emotion and sensation than pure narrative (which has a distinct feeling of been-there-done-that about it) and either way it’s grubbily told, but it’s narrow, small-scale approach and focused performances keep it from falling apart too much.