Avoid Self/Less at all costs

Your honour, I assert that Ryan Reynolds is no actor. He’s pretty and has a certain charm about him, sure, but make no mistake, he could not act his way out of a paper bag.

For evidence, I present every single film he’s ever been in, up to and including his latest disaster, disastrously named Self/Less. Firstly, there are a million names that would have been better, even ‘Van Wilder: Second Chances’ or ‘Reborn but At What Cost?’.

Bear with me as I attempt to revisit the plot without losing my patience or my temper. We start off with Damien Hale (Sir Ben Kingsley), a brilliant, wealthy and prominent New York architect who is in the terminal stage of his fight with cancer. Hale figures that he can use $250 million to undergo a kooky and experimental procedure called shedding, wherein his memory, intelligence and personality gets zapped into a newer, younger, more Ryan Reynolds-y body while leaving his older, sicker body to die away. He’s told that this new body was grown out of a Petri dish in a lab. Of course it was.

Sounds easy, right? Unfortunately, there are some unexpected side effects, not the least of which is that now the movie no longer has an Oscar-winning dramatic actor in it. Kingsley has talent, depth, range, expressiveness, and gravitas. Even though we only see him on screen for 10 minutes or so, we feel his plight, understand him, and empathize with him despite being an otherwise unlikeable individual. He says more just sitting there than most do in 10 pages of script.

Instead we are left with Ryan Reynolds whose next major role is Deadpool, a snarky, masked anti-superhero. Yippee.

The rest of Self/Less does continue with the usually emotive Victor Garber. Watchmen’s Matthew Goode also has a major role as the ethically dubious doctor who performs the shedding procedure using two side-by-side MRI machines through a clinic called Phoenix Biogenic.

What should have been a psychological and philosophical think piece about the pursuit of immortality turns into a movie with a personality disorder. Is it an action film since we keep seeing Rugged Ryan fist-fight and car-chase his way through the scenery? Is it a melodrama as Melancholic Ryan (doing his level best to channel Sir Ben) relearns how to walk, struggles to find himself anew and mourns all of the things that he never did in his first life?

Or is it a comedy since Smug Ryan gets all those great one-liners about “his new body smell?” Edward, as this new human is called, is surprised by his somehow innate excellence in martial fighting, much like Matt Damon was in the first Jason Bourne movie. Sidebar: is Matt Damon a better actor than Ryan Reynolds? Overruled: they are the same actor, except one somehow gets cast in bigger scale projects and has a higher salary than the other.

Sadly, all of these parts – action, melodrama, morality tale, and comedy – are somehow all lesser than the whole. We are left feeling like we are offered a slice of cake but what comes on the plate is more like the bottom layer, a bite out of the rest, with a pale, sour cherry on top. It is a snoozy, humdrum borefest. If you dig the theme of living forever, watch Death Becomes Her for something life-affirming or The Fountain for a really good downer instead.

Director Tarsem Singh once held a lot of promise when he burst onto the scene with The Cell. That was only 15 years ago. Now, he’s dredging the barrel with this movie of the week that people should see right through before they even think of buying a ticket. It is a mendacious waste of time, your honour, and a crime against entertainment. The community demands a verdict of two life sentences, set to serve subsequently and not concurrently like the Reynolds/Kingsley character does in this drivel.

I rest my case.