A futuristic resort populated by robots where the guest can act out
any fantasy may sound familiar to anyone who’s seen or heard of Michael
Crichton’s
Westworld but director
Brian Miller’s Vice does so little with the premise it’s almost not worth calling this movie a rip-off.
The script has cobbled together elements from several science fiction
movies as well as a collection of clichés from cop shows, making the
hardest thing for viewers of this film to do to spot anything original
in it. When one watches the 1973
Westworld you can’t
help but wonder about the plausibility of such a park; guns can’t fire
at a warm body but how does that work with swords and knives? Or how
does a ricochet know not to kill a guest? How does a chair across the
back of the head in a bar fight not put the guest in the hospital? Yet
decades later we have this movie, which not only does not address these
issues, it actually backtracks and makes the park even more dangerous
for the guests.
You know you are in a bad place when this is your safer option.
Set in the near future, billionaire Julian Michaels (
Bruce Willis) has designed the ultimate resort: VICE, a city that operates like a live action
Grand Theft Auto
game. You can rob banks, murder, rape, or do anything your twisted mind
can think of. It’s all in fun though, as the people you are raping and
killing aren’t actually people, but robots. The problem here is in the
design of these robots. To make all this violence and debauchery more
“fun” for the guests, the robots are almost human; their exterior flesh
and much of their organs is cloned genetic material with only their
brains and skeleton fully artificial, so it feels to the guests that
they are torturing a living breathing person. But that isn’t even the
worst of it, as these artificial people have been programmed with real
emotions and lives with no knowledge that they are robots. That way when
they are being raped or murdered they react as if it is real, because
to them it
is real.
That is all kinds of fucked up.
This movie centers on a young bartender named Kelly (
Ambyr Childers)
who wakes up from a wonderful dream about being in a peaceful church.
She is in an especially good mood today because it is her last day of
work before leaving for a trip around the world. Her roommate and
co-worker Melissa (
Charlotte Kirk)
is excited for Kelly, and they plan on a fun night together after work.
That is until the creepy guy they met earlier in the day catches up to
them in the parking lot, repeatedly shooting Melissa with his handgun
before choking the life out of Kelly.
It’s all part of the show.
Of course no real crime has been committed here, because both Kelly
and Melissa are artificial people. Even though they feel every moment of
terror and pain of their deaths it doesn’t matter, because they will be
patched up, memory wiped, and they will repeat their last day again and
again and again.
Think Groundhog Day only without the fun and charm.
Trouble starts when Julian Michaels orders a quick turnaround on
Kelly and Melissa because they expect the park to be extra busy. This
cutting corners decision causes this “last day” for Kelly to not go so
well, as all of a sudden she gets flashes of memory of her and her
friends murders and begins to seize as she is racked with the pain of
her past death. A “medical team” is quickly dispatched to bring her back
to the lab, where she is informed that the only way to fix this memory
glitch is to force her to experience every single death she has had
since inception, as that is supposedly the only way to hard wipe her
memory. Kelly goes into more convulsions as she is forced to recall the
full extent of the horror that has been her apparent life. Instead of
getting a mind wiped robot the doctor finds himself facing off against a
pissed off self-aware robot, and she doesn’t want to play anymore.
“Fuck this blue skies on Mars shit!”
She escapes simply by running out of the room and out of the resort
because all the armed security guards, some packing grenade launchers,
make the Storm troopers of
Star Wars movies look like
crack shots. Now Kelly doesn’t have robot strength or powers of any
kind, she is by all intents and purposes just a normal woman, so her
escape is beyond ridiculous. What is even more ridiculous is that she
isn’t in the real world for more than ten minutes before running into a
rapist. The film tries to sell the idea that the people in the park who
do awful things will eventually do it in the real world, but we find out
almost immediately that this rapist had never visited the resort
because he couldn’t afford to, which kind of blows the hell out of that
premise.
“I’m only attacking you because I can’t afford to go to Vice, so who’s really the victim here?”
Kelly isn’t the films only protagonist. We also have Detective Roy (
Thomas Jane),
a rogue cop who refuses to play by the rules. If his character was
anymore of a two dimensional stereotype he could have been replaced by a
cardboard standee. Roy is this films moral trumpeter and he rolls out
all the same arguments people make against violent video games, but in
the case of Vice City where people are physically performing these acts
and not just hitting R3 L1 L2, he may have a point there. The real point
the film should have been focusing on is what makes a person human. We
get some lip service about being human and how it has to do with the
ability to retain memories. So as long as the robot’s memories are wiped
each day, and can’t develop new ones, they will never truly be
sentient. Kelly certainly proved that wrong.
Sadly, sentient does not equal interesting.
The movie becomes your standard science fiction chase movie with a
very bored Bruce Willis ordering countless heavily armed thugs to track
down the escaped robot, while Thomas Jane walks through the motions as
the cop who will not be stopped. Any chance for philosophical debates
over what constitutes humanity is jettisoned in favor of poorly
choreographed action scenes that bring villainous ineptitude to a new
low.
The glaucoma plagued guards of Vice City.
Eventually, Kelly gets a computer upgrade from a local hacker so that
she and Roy can take down Julian as well as Vice City. They split up,
with Kelly gunning down security guards while Roy kills a couple of
guards on his own before forcing a computer tech to download a virus
into the mainframe.
“There is a good chance I may lose my badge over this.”
Kelly finally confronts Julian, who doesn’t seem concerned that there
is a very pissed off robot pointing a machine gun at him, and she is
even more shocked when she finds herself unable to pull the trigger.
Julian informs her that, “
It’s the one thing the creators didn’t think of; protecting man from machines.”
That is some hardcore bullshit if we are to believe that it never
occurred to the people who designed these robot that they could ever be a
danger to civilians. Of course super evil genius Julian thought of
this, so deep in her programming there is a safeguard that won’t allow
her to kill high placed officials in the company.
Damn that Directive Four!
Which leads to the big question, “
Why in the hell would you make theme park robots capable of killing anyone?”
If these robots are programmed in such a way that they don’t know they
are robots, what is to stop one of them from harming or killing a “guest
rapist” in self defense? In
Westworld robots were programmed not to harm the guests and only when there was a major malfunction did this change, but in
Vice
there seems to be no safeguards in place at all. Julian would have been
sued into bankruptcy long before Kelly became self-aware.
“All those… moments… will be lost in time, like tears… in… rain.”
And because this film hadn’t ripped off
Westworld
enough, the virus that Roy uploaded gives all the robot residents of
Vice all their memories back. So, like Kelly, they all experience every
horrible thing done to them over the the course of the years. This
causes all of the robots to go berserk and begin murdering the guests. I
think Roy losing his badge is the least of his worries.
Numerous counts of reckless endangerment and manslaughter to say the least.
This is a bad movie and one without an original thought in its ninety
minute head, and I haven’t even mentioned the robot designer who used
his dead wife’s DNA to make Kelly, secretly dating/stalking her for
years. It’s just embarrassing. Super Cop Roy hates this park because
its corrupted influence is bleeding over into his city, but this would
be the least of the controversies facing a park like this where you have
artificial intelligent robots/clones that are being raped and murdered
on a daily basis. You would have people protesting the creation of
artificial intelligence, people protesting the cloning, and then people
protesting the premise of the park. It’d be almost impossible for a
facility like this to get green lit as it would be tied up in Congress
for decades. That this movie did not get a proper theatrical release is
no surprise, that it stars the usually dependable Bruce Willis and
Thomas Jane is. Clearly these two were in complete paycheck mode during
the making of this piece of crap.
“So any word on Die Hard 6?”
HBO is making a
Westworld television series created
by Jonathon Nolan, so I guess we’ll just have to wait until then to see a
little thought put into the idea of a theme park full of robots, its
dangers, and moral implications. I think I’ll just go and watch Yul
Brynner hunt down Richard Benjamin.
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