How I was able to sit through this one is a mystery to me. The film has bombed exponentially in the box office and it makes perfect sense – you’d have to be a technological dunce in order for all this to make sense. What we have are two separate storylines that shouldn’t even interact with each other. The first involves a researcher (Keanu Reeves) who is attempted to transfer human consciousness into machines. The first test involves a man who probably didn’t sign up to be a damn robot in the first place, so they shouldn’t have just taken his corpse and used it for the program without his permission. That was a bit offensive to me, in all honesty. Nowhere in the film was it stated that the soldier had asked for his permission before being put into a machine, so it makes perfect sense that he would not be thrilled with the idea. Needless to say, he loses his mind and things go awry for the researcher. Then we have a scene where Keanu is with his stereotypical white bread family, which are so bland that no one cares about them from the beginning. A car crash results in the loss of them all, to which Keanu somehow gets the ability to regrow them in large expensive capsules inside of his basement. Still with me here? Keanu and some brainy scientist friend discuss problems with the cloning process like rapid aging and such, until Keanu finally discovers a breakthrough and is able to bring his whole family back. Well, except for their daughter – which is removed from their neural pathways. Sorry dear, there just weren’t enough capsules. In any case, the man who has given them the money and equipment comes knocking and notices that Keanu successfully cloned his family, which then reveals that he works for the government and military applications and yada yada. So now, Keanu and his family have to fight their way through a series of pursuers in the form of several action scenes. Finally, Keanu figures out a way to transfer his consciousness into that of a strikingly similar blue robot, which is able to overpower our villain and his henchmen pretty easily. I almost felt like I was watching Hollywood’s take on Mega Man in that scene, which redeemed the film for me a bit. In fact, I almost hoped that when the villain said, “there will be more after me” that it would lead to something like an army of robots. I hate to say it, but Keanu proved in that short amount of time that he might just be able to make a halfway decent Mega Man. As long as the quips from the nineties TV Show were added in here and there. At any rate, the film ended with Keanu and his family on a beach, still somehow able to resurrect their daughter. Meanwhile, instead of fighting Dr. Wily’s robots, we find that Keanu Man is helping what I thought was a villain in developing this new form of transference into a robot body for aging rich folks. So much for those Ruby Spears references. But seriously, this was such a waste of time, they should have just cast Keanu as Mega Man and been done with it. You’ve sold me on this idea, if that was the goal. So to hell with the clones and this entire plot for that matter, because seeing Keanu become a blue fighting robot and managing to make it work was more than enough proof for me that we don’t need Vin Diesel, Dwayne Johnson, John Cena or anyone else in the role of the blue bomber.
(Too Long)
