Sickness – Action Hero Movies

This movie features Hackers style music & visuals, which is not surprising since it’s from the same year (1995).

It also features agents in long black leather coats, and probably inspired many things about The Matrix, except that this movie is about the data being stored inside a cybernetically enhanced human, rather than the human’s mind being captured by a virtual matrix. Although there is one woman who lives on in a virtual realm after dying, like a kind of AI. Keanu Reeves‘s character Johnny even does a bit of Tai Chi in this movie, early on, to help cope with brain capacity overload.

Dina Meyer plays Jane, the cybernetically enhanced bodyguard Johnny hires to save his life and help him get where he needs to be. They become quite close.

A youngish Dolph Lundren (in his mid to late 30s) with long messy hair plays one of the main baddies.

Udo Kier (the pureblood burnt in the sun, in Blade) plays one of the main characters early on, who double crosses Johnny then is killed by the Yakuza when Johnny gets away.

This movie was probably great in its day, and is still quite memorable but the pace is a bit slow and the action is a bit mild by the best of modern standards. Still, the acting quality is real even if they seem to be slightly winging it with a shallow plot and loose script put together on the fly.

By half way through, this movie looks set for a Below Average rating, but that’s no knock on the acting level, it’s more due to the datedness of the special effects and the tameness of adrenaline, and with all that considered, it’s quite a respectable rating. Some bits are of course better than others. But the second hour is very trashy throughout — barely watchable in fact. So I think a final score of So-So is plenty fair, if not generous.

Elysium starts off with an interesting dystopian sci-fi concept but rather gritty screenplay. In the first half hour, not much happens to the least cast member except he receives a fatal dose of radiation poisoning in his workplace and is given five days left to live. This urges him to rekindle his old master criminal ways in order to reach the satellite city called Elysium – a place for the privileged to live away from the rest of humanity on Earth. He attempts to get there in order to heal himself, but it’s a dangerous mission – families have tried before and they tend to get shot down indiscriminately.

There’s a nice bit of action before the end of the first hour.

Much of the second hour constitutes a bit of an anxiety & depression fest – probably good for horror-drama junkies, but not so much for smooth action hero movie connoisseurs. Easily skippable if you’ve seen it before. Fortunately, that toxic junk at least intermittently subsides to make way for some half-decent action. This movie had a lot of potential to be a lot better than it eventually was though. Unfortunately, due to the amount of bad mixed with the good, I really struggle to rate it Above Average but I will on account of its genre & stars, and its resultant memorability.

Matt Damon manages to shave off his Jason Bourne identity (see what I did there?) by going bald in this movie – it’s not pleasing on the eye but at least it succeeds in creating a fresh new persona for this movie – this one having much more of an air of vulnerability from the start, since he gets radiation poisoning early on – quite fitting for a regularly toxic movie experience.

The fight scene at the end is dry and over dragged out – easily skippable, even though it’s kind of fast action – reminiscent of a Tony Jaa movie – no flying elbows, but just as spiritually dead.

Promoting radiation chamber type beds as cancer cures, at the end, was the icing on the cake – quite inkeeping with the Big Harma theme since the start.

On the plus side, the main baddies are played quite well by Jodie Foster (brains) and Sharlto Copley (brawn). Many of the cast members are pretty good, even if the movie is a bit thin and nasty while posing like it’s strongly representing a really cool genre.