For Friday's Movie Night, we watched Gemini Man (2019): a standard plotline about a professional assassin (Will Smith) who is trying to retire, when suddenly the Agency sends 23,345 agents to kill him. For reasons. The twist: the main assassin out to kill him is his clone, Junior, created from his DNA without his consent and raised to be a soulless killing machine -- the only agent competent enough to take him out.
If no one else is good enough to do the job, why send the other 23, 344 agents to kill him? Besides, there's no "soulless killing machine" gene. You have to be raised that way.
The plot made no sense, of course, but tt was rather fun looking at contemporary action-adventure hero Will Smith face to face with The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Smith's face was attached to the body of Victor Hugo (top photo: the actor, not the author of Les Miserables), and then digitally de-aged.
There were beautiful exteriors of Budapest, a chase scene through the streets of Cartagena, Colombia, the science-fictiony train station in Liege, Belgium, and some on-the-dock scenes in Georgia.
And -- spoiler alert -- for the first time in action-adventure movie history, the Hero doesn't get the Girl.
There is a Girl, of course, and the Assassin does court her -- or pretends to -- before they have to run for their lives. They rescue each other, and tend to each others' wounds. But he specifically states that he's not attracted to her. There's no fade-out kiss. In the last scene, Junior has enrolled in college, and they show up for a visit, bickering like his parents. They hug, but they don't kiss.
Not that the Assassin is gay. Director Ang Lee is very careful to demonstrate that every major male character is heterosexual.
1. The Assassin complains about all the things he's missed in his job killing people: being a husband and father, having a family, the entire heterosexist trajectory. At the end of the movie, he's got a sort of family with the Girl and Junior.
Before they realize that Junior is a clone, the Girl suggests that he might be the Assassin's son. "No, that's impossible." "Could you have fathered a son without knowing it?" "No, absolutely not." But he doesn't mean that he's gay -- he mentions affairs with women.
2. He advises Junior to give up the assassin life because then he'll be able to find a girl and get married. Plus, back home, Junior has a giant painting of a woman next to his bed. At the end of the movie, he is shown walking through the college campus with his four friends, three girls and a boy.
3. Baron (Benedict Wong) flies the Assassin and the Girl from Georgia to his house in Cartagena to hide out. Then he borrows a private plane to fly them to Hungary, then to Georgia again (who does he know that hands over the keys to a private plane to fly over three continents?). He demonstrates that he is heterosexual by treating the plane like a woman ("Like all my encounters, this was short but meaningful."), and by singing the Ray Charles song "I Got a Woman": "I got a woman that's good to me..."
4. The Assassin goes to visit Jack (Douglas Hodge, left, old photo), an old friend or operative or something, on his boat. He mentions that his wife is in Paris and his son is in boarding school. Then a girl in a bikini appears in the background, apparently a hookup. Later, some of the 23,345 agents invade the boat and kill him and bikini girl, for reasons that make no sense. But at least Jack has demonstrated that he is heterosexual.
5. There's a scene set in boarding school, but not a call-back to Jack's son. Just to be confusing, it's about someone named Patterson, whose role in all of this is unclear, in the headmaster's office, upbraiding his son (Daniel Salyers): "If you don't do that at home, why would you do it in class?" Having established that Patterson is heterosexual, the plotline is dropped. (in real life there are gay dads, of course, but here the son appears to exist solely to demonstrate that Patterson has had sex with a woman).
6. The only male character to not get a "yes, he's heterosexual" scene is Marino (E.J. Bonilla), who helps the Assassin set up his introductory hit (shooting someone in a train that's rushing past at 100 mph! Why not just wait until he gets off?). But Marino is killed (for reasons that make no sense) very early, so maybe there was no time to heterosexualize him.
At least there's no fade-out kiss.
My grade: A for the exterior shots, D for the nonsensical plot and rampant heterosexualization.
F because I looked everywhere for a picture of E.J. Bonilla, and when I finally found one, it turned out to be a ,jfif.