I like a good sci-fi flick. And the blurb for this one sounded intriguing: Set in the near future, private detective David Carmichael is hired by Marlon Veidt, an eccentric businessman, to track down his missing daughter. David teams up with Jane, a highly advanced A.I. to solve the mystery.”  That it stars Guy Pierce also made me think it might be worth a look. But boy was I wrong! Not that the story is all that bad, but the longer I watched, the more I realized that someone had watched Blade Runner one too many times and was incapable to coming up with their own story. And then, in his feature debut director Andrew Baird chose to go with a ripped off look and feel from the same film. Why, why, why?

Matilda Anna Ingrid Lutz (Revenge) plays the robot with a soul and she’s very good, as is Pierce (Memento, L.A. Confidential). He’s an ex-cop paid to enter Zone 414, an exclusive walled off city where rich people go to live out their sex and violence fantasies with replicants androids. He’s in search of a girl who thought hanging with the robots would be a good way to rebel against her rich daddy. One of the last people (used loosely) to see her was the beautiful android Jane (Lutz). And of course she and David team up to scour the grimy underbelly of the enclave for the girl’s whereabouts.

Jane is really the only likeable character, but even her dialogue is marred by an overly cliched script. And once you start to see how closely the film is hewing the Blade Runner story, it pales in comparison. It’s not to difficult to see how someone might have taken the Blade Runner world and tried to do something different within it, but this was just lazy filmmaking.  Do yourself a favor and stream the original and the sequel Blade Runner films. You’ll thank me later.

In Theaters, on Digital and On Demand September 3, 2021

 

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