Self/less - 2015

It’s a very strange but interesting movie, glad I saw it once, not so sure I want to watch it again. 

Damian (Ben Kingsley) is a multi-millionaire who has now only six months to live; his only relative in the world is his daughter Claire, but they don’t have a good relationship, he left her when she was a little kid.

One day he finds a card in his pocket: “they can help you” written on it. He goes to that place to see what is it that they do, and is told that they put a person’s consciousness into a lifeless body, so the person can live again.

When his sickness gets worse, he agrees to it. He kills himself in public, so that everybody knows he’s dead, and his body is taken to a lab where, with a procedure, his body dies but he lives on in a young body (Ryan Reynolds). From now on, it all goes down. As he awakes, an image of a field and maybe a woman on a horse pop into his mind, very vividly. He’s told that it’s an hallucination, that it’ll pass, that he just needs to take pills everyday and he’ll be fine. They give him a new identity and a place to stay in another city. They give him seven pills, just for a week, then he’ll be given more, a week at a time (this is one of the things that doesn’t really make sense to me, because they want him to take the pills! They absolutely do not want him to stop taking the pills! So why don’t they give him more of it? So that he can’t analize them? He’d only need one for that, couldn’t he do it at the beginning of the week? He’s so rich! Makes no sense to me)

He starts a life of parties and a different woman every night (of course, that’s the usual definition of ‘having fun’ apparently: drinking and having sex with lots of different girls… :-/ the same old stereotype, are men really so void? Their idea of a good time and after day, is really just that? If they have that, they really don’t care for friends, hobbies, interests, feelings…? According to the movies, men only care for drinking and having soul-less sex. It’s so sad, it’s a pity)

Anyway, Damien was old so now he enjoys it for a while then starts getting bored, of course. One day he misses one pill, doesn’t take it, just one and more images of a home and a woman and a child fill his mind. 

They tell him it’s just hallucination and that he needs a change, maybe moving to another city will help; instead, he goes to the place he saw in his ‘hallucination’ ( I have no idea on how did he know where that place was).

He meets a woman who calls him Mark, says he’s her husband and she believed he was dead, she was told he was dead.

Some men come after him but they all escape out of there alive. There’s a lot of running away, car chasing scenes, soldier-like-fights…  :-/ 

He escapes and goes to see his old friend Martin (Victor Garber), my fav in the movie. It was Martin who put that card into his pocket, he knew of them because two years ago his young son died and he had him “reborn” in another body. Damian sees a child in the house, understands, and tells them the truth: Martin believed that the bodies were created in the lab, and is horrified, shocked when Damian tells him that they’re not, those people use somebody else’s bodies, and that they took somebody’s son’s body so that he could have his own son back… but after two years there’s no way of turning back, nothing they can do for that child (plus, how sad it is that Martin’s son, since the world thinks him dead, can never go out…).

Again Damian runs away with Mark’s wife Madeline and daughter Anna; they are captured, but he rescues them and sends them away, for their own safety. He writes a goodbye letter to Claire and then he goes to the Caribbean (where they are I guess) and then he stops taking the pills (of course, how could it end otherwise? It’s a movie) so Mark can return to his wife and daughter. Of course. A nice ending. Obvious, but the right one, a different ending would have been a surprise, but a bad one.

I like the beginning and the end of the movie, what I don’t like it’s the middle, when he becomes a sort of die-hard-Rambo…it's incredible like American movies make it look like any guy could easily beat trained guards/soldiers...  it’s so absurd, that it brings down the whole thing.