Surrogates (DVD)

Surrogates (2009) starring Bruce Willis, Radha Mitchell, Rosamund Pike, Ving Rhames, Boris Kodjoe, Michael Cudlitz, James Cromwell, James Francis Ginty. It's sometime in the future, and something like 98 percent of the population are living their lives vicariously, through robotic surrogates. The "surries" or "synths," as they are known, allow one to look any way one wants, to take risks one normally wouldn't take, without risk to the human body. Willis plays Tom Greer, an FBI agent who gets involved in a case where someone has invented a weapon that kills, not just the surrie, but the human operator. Through a series of events, he also loses his synth, so he must face the world in his original human body (or "meatbag"). It's all kind of creepy, and maybe it was meant to be. But I also found it chaotic, compressing too much action into too little time -- the rare instance of a movie being too short -- and it was hard to keep the characters straight and to make sense of it all. The subtitles are rather good. Grade: C+