Vice refers to the setting of the film: an exclusive resort run by Julian Michaels (Bruce Willis) that allows the rich and powerful to commit acts of depravity upon its residents, who are all artificial beings that aren’t aware of their true nature. The “residents” are actually androids made to look and feel like real people. They wake up each morning with no memory of whatever punishment they took the night before. But Kelly (Ambyr Childers) has a malfunction and starts remembering all the terrible things that have happened to her. She escapes the resort, and becomes the target of a manhunt that wreaks havoc all over the city.
There’s also a cop (Thomas Jane) trying to bring Vice down, and a scientist (Bryan Greenberg) with a connection to Kelly. There’s a lot of backstory to Vice, and its leaden handling of the exposition sets the tone for the rest of the movie. It relies heavily on leaden expository dialogue, the characters made to give up any semblance of humanity as they blather on about one subject after another. It isn’t just the central character that’s made to look like an android. Every member of this cast of characters is an artificial construct, a collection of clichés made to spout recycled dialogue and clumsy exposition.
This is the kind of movie where the cop is a rogue policeman who’s told that he’s a good cop, but is just inches away from losing his badge. To his credit, Thomas Jane eats up this role, chewing the scenery with the gusto of a Nicolas Cage or a Gary Busey. It’s exactly the kind of performance needed to liven up this particular brand of cinematic garbage. Unfortunately, he stands alone in this cast in committing to the awfulness. Ambyr Childers is mostly just forgettable, and Bruce Willis barely bothers to keep his eyes open in the scenes that he’s in.
What follows is largely unenjoyable schlock. Once the chase begins, the characters basically run through a bunch of same-y urban environments, almost all of them inexplicably lit by the same standing fluorescent tubes. The high concept trappings never really feel like they matter. Some time, for example, is spend on explaining that the main character can be upgraded, that she can download skills that could help her take down the people who are after her. This seems like it could have been a cool thing, but the movie basically squanders it in its final moments.
The movie just isn’t very good at staging action. There are several gunfights, but none of them have the impact they’re meant to have. The few fight sequences are completely unmemorable, a combination of unimaginative choreography and a sheer lack of physical talent draining all the fun from the combat. The film’s climax is weirdly sedate, the characters basically able to walk into what should be a fortress, meeting only token resistance. The movie isn’t very good to begin with, but it still manages to disappoint as it stumbles towards a conclusion.
Dumb, low-budget action movies don’t have to be bad at all. But they usually have to be simple. Vice can never get around to the goods because it spends so much time having to explain its milieu. Time that should be spent having android heroes beat up generic bad guys is instead spent on a backstory that isn’t really worth caring about. The movie doesn’t really have anything interesting to say about the ethics that arise from having artificial humanoids. It might as well have concentrated all its efforts towards making something dumb but thrilling, instead of dumb and boring.
My Rating:
