Reviewed by Alicia Glass

Review Rating: 7

Warning! Spoiler Review!

In the not-too-distant future, humanity lives their lives through surrogate robots that protect them from harm, and one cop has to leave his surrogate to investigate a string of murders involving surrogates and their operators.

It’s a shame really, this movie had a lot more potential when it was being advertised in trailers. Seeing Bruce Willis run around as the lead who is of course his stock in trade type of character, a cop, would have been just fine and dandy, if he and his surrogate weren’t so different. (His surrogate is signifigantly younger looking and wears a strawberry blonde wig – I kid you not.) His wife is a much older woman, at least physically, than her surrogate, and sees nothing wrong with running her surrogate around in place of real life for the rest of her life. And then surrogates, the supposedly safest way to live ones life ever-ever, start getting fried right along with their operators, and of course Tom Greer (Willis) has to go investigate it – without his surrogate.

There’s a Prophet kind of guy, played by Ving Rhames with really odd-looking dreadlocks, and it turns out he’s actually another surrogate body for the guy who’s been running the resistance trying to awaken people all along. The same guy who originally built the whole surrogate system in the first place, I’m terribly sorry, but that wasn’t a surprise at all. James Cromwell stars as Canter, the inventor of the Surrogate system, and he actually does a pretty good job at it, although it’s more or less exactly the same as his performance in I, Robot.

It’s not a bad try, all things considered. The original plot was pretty good, but the movie makes it more and more unlikely the further things go along. It’s like watching a train wreck, and Willis’ character decides hey, let’s hit the gas and see what happens! Oi.

Worth a look or two, but sadly not a placer in the ever-expanding category of new and awesome Sci-Fi dramas.