TOTAL RECALL (2012)

year: 2012 cast: Colin Farrell, Kate Beckinsale, Jessica Biel rating: **

A twenty-year-old movie being remade would seem a lot stranger but, a month earlier, a ten-year-old flick got the same treatment. Like the SPIDERMAN reboot, the main character of TOTAL RECALL is a lot more serious and brooding.

Colin Farrell is Douglas Quaid in a future resembling BLADE RUNNER with a stronger work ethic. He and his buddy build police robots but Quaid is not content. Haunted by violent dreams of a mysterious woman, he’s wondering if there’s something better than his dreary existence. Heck, even his gorgeous wife is concerned.

Unlike Sharon Stone’s sexy and lethal Lori Quaid of the original, Kate Beckinsale is more like Tommy Lee Jones in THE FUGITIVE. But that’s once Quaid… after using Total Recall in which, as your head's strapped to electrodes, implanted memories seem more than real… is on the run: he’s actually a spy that can free an underground Resistance from an oppressive dictator bent on… some sort of mass attack.

The problem is there’s more action than storyline – but that doesn’t stop each character from spouting loads of boring exposition between each bombastic chase.

Sure, it all looks cool, but the villains and the good guys seem too much alike to mean anything to the viewer.

So while Arnold Schwarzenegger eventually had something to fight for on the planet Mars, Colin Farrell, stuck on Earth, is merely surviving. And since he was never totally strapped into that titular memory machine in the first place, his recall means very little this time around.