Gemini Man (2019)

Summary: Militarily trained assassin Henry Brogan is retiring, but finds himself  targeted and needs to escape. He is helped by a young woman, Danny, who is a secret service operative assigned to monitor him. Henry and Danny escape to Colombia with his friend Baron, but they are followed by operatives from a private military agency, Gemini. Finally Clay Varris, boss of Gemini sends out his best man in pursuit of the pair, who chases them all over Colombia, Europe and America. Finally the pursuing man is found to be a clone of Henry, so it is him as a young man. The clone, known as Junior, changes sides and joins Henry and Danny, but they are faced with yet another assassin, of even more awesome capabilities.

Content: No sex or nudity, was there any drinking? They might have had a beer. There is the initial sniper assassination, showing us Henry’s skills. Most of the film is taken up with various forms of warfare. There are motor cycle chases, car chases and fire fights with all sorts of automatic weapons. Now and again there are confrontations between Henry or his people and Varris. Also some oversight from the secret service people in their offices.

A View: This outing was not liked by the critics and is said to have lost about 100 million dollars for its backers. I thought that the choice of Mary Elizabeth Winstead to be the supporting secret service agent was pretty good; generally the actors did well, and the action sequences were fine. So for everybody it might be that the plot did not stand up to scrutiny, which may be why the film got the thumbs down, and the script languished in development hell for more than 10 years. But it was not that bad. If you like a shoot’em up, give it a go.

Will Smith’s canon of work has been pretty variable but three films which I have reviewed on this site, which are worth a view are: I am Legend, Men in Black 3 and Hancock.