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Before you pay good money to sit through
Gary Fleder’s Impostor, try to picture what Blade Runner would’ve
looked like as a low-budget series on a UHF channel. That’s what Impostor is
like. This new sci-fi flick puts that philosophical workhorse “what it means to have
a soul” through its paces, and in the process plunders something from almost every
bleak vision of the future ever put on film, including Metropolis, Things to Come, 1984, Star Wars, Brazil, and The Fifth Element. But Impostor takes most of its flavor from Ridley
Scott’s seminal 1982 film. Like Blade Runner,
it’s based on a Philip K. Dick story revolving around lifelike, murderous cyborgs,
and features a noir-tinged manhunt through a
city that resembles a giant decaying flea-market.
Set in 2079
(60 years after the events of Blade Runner, if
anyone’s keeping count), Impostor has as
its backdrop a 30-year war between Earth and some imperialistic meanies from the Alpha
Centauri galaxy. This time around, though, the protagonist isn’t a bounty hunter
assigned to track down the replicants, but a top-flight weapons designer accused of being
an alien-planted android programmed to kill a government official. Gary Sinise plays the
man whose memories might only be a figment of a computer chip. Vincent D’Onofrio is
the relentless government bloodhound who’s chasing him. Madeline Stowe and Tony
Shalhoub are his wife and best friend, there to express faith or doubt in him as he
struggles to establish his humanity. And Mekhi Phifer is the requisite streetsmart black
man who helps him along the way.
That’s
one hell of a talented lineup, but Impostor’s
performers act as if they’re only meeting the terms of a judge’s alternative
sentencing, giving the movie the dour reek of a drunk-driving school. Shalhoub, who last
year set the house on fire as the charismatic lawyer in The Man Who Wasn’t There,
sleepwalks through ten colorless lines of dialogue before making an early exit. D’Onofrio comes off
worst of all, giving a performance so stiff and joyless that it’s a wonder his
storm-troopers don’t suspect him of being a
robot. Impostor also includes a real
head-scratcher of a cameo: Lindsay Crouse, looking starchier than ever, as the chancellor
of a worldwide dictatorship. It's only too bad that
Woody Allen isn't around to flatten her nose with a steamroller.
Computer graphics have made it
possible for even modestly-budgeted movies to include some flossy effects, and in a
breathless prelude that sketches in the background of the intergalactic war, Impostor provides one eye-catching sight: a spiky
futurist skyline jutting up beneath the force-field that covers it like a bell-jar. Once
that’s over, though, the movie settles into a lot of overly familiar prop-work, such
as the chintzy luminous
boxes that serve as DNA-sampling machines. “The Vivisector,” a torture
device that looks like an eggbeater, stands out as the one original touch in the
overcrowded production design.
Originality is in short supply
throughout Impostor, but even its predictable
ending could be forgiven if only the getting there was more fun than it is. Instead of trying to be a
latter-day Blade Runner, it might’ve been a
gas to use this cast in a deliberate attempt to make an Ed Wood movie. But a chasm looms
between the sarcastic and the slipshod, and this is a movie consumed by endless chases
through hallways and tunnels, with a ready-made escape route—if only a hole in the
wall—always materializing at the critical moment. Sinise’s predicament—the
charge of treason that threatens his life, separation from his loved ones, and doubts
about the nature of his own identity—is delivered so carelessly that none of the
earnest talk about his humanity can ever take hold. Impostor
proves once again that it’s hard to gain traction when you’re standing on
cheese.
- Tom Block
