Review of Total Recall (2012) by Aznassassin — 22 Nov 2012

The first half of the film: brilliantly shot and full of excellent action sequences. The later half...its like as if a teenage douchebag came into the production studio, replaced the final sections of the script with his weirdass, cheesy fight scenes and a crappy ending and managed to convince the director to keep them when they found out it happened.

I was sceptical going into this reboot. There's no Mars, the premise is exactly the same and many plot elements are recycled. But the first hour it convinced me otherwise: this is going to be epic. Awesome cinematography and tense fight/chase scenes in a beautiful, futuristic city (so beautiful that I actually want to live there) and more action/great dialogue after.

Then, without warning, the movie just went downhill. You know, like a ferrari suddenly having punctured tires, following by engine problems and everything slowly goes to **** This is the 2012 Total Recall.

You just watch a great movie, brilliantly shot (one of the best ive seen in a long time) with awesome action scenes all on top of a well-loved story, slowly get peppered with **** and eventually, a cartload of **** And then when you hit the ending, you'll be cutting yourself.

Had they retained the awesome futurisitic utopia/minory repory-esque fantasy world with tight action scenes so evident in the first half of the film for the entire film and had a satisfying climax and ending, I would've given this film a 8/10 or even a 9/10.

Sadly, dunno what happened to the script writer in the final pages of the movie script . Maybe he got drunk. Maybe he just got frickin lazy. Or maybe he got jacked into rekall and a false memory implanted when finishing the final sections of the script.

Srsly, when you watch this movie, right after Quaid arrives at the Resistance base, just turn off the movie - it gets fully ****house from there and even Brian Cranston's awesome acting could've save it.

Though there's another two things that this movie did right - it cemented and consolidated Kate Beckinsale as one of my favourite actresses and added Jessica Biel to my **** list.