First Hit: There is a hint of an interesting story in this film/script and it didn’t make it on to the screen.
If you want to see Bruce Willis as he might have looked 25 years ago with a really dated hair style see the beginning of this film. If you want to see Bruce as he actually looks today (before the beatings he takes to add scratches and blood stains to his face) watch the last 2/3 of the film.
The premise of this film is that with surrogates we all can live our fantasy life by sitting in a specially designed chair with a headset allowing us to control and experience what our mechanical surrogate is experiencing for us.
Our surrogates can look like anything we want and they can do anything we want them to do and aren't willing to do with our real bodies. There is a fail safe system which keeps the controllers from dying if the surrogate gets waxed while doing something dangerous. However, something happens to the son of the inventor of the surrogates after his surrogate is found electronically fried up and the son, himself, is found with liquefied brains.
The FBI is called in and Willis, as Tom Greer, gets the call. Then more people die the same way and the intensity goes up a notch. The counter to this surrogate culture is a group of humans who believe that having surrogates is harmful to the human race and therefore the government has given them their own economic zones (much like the American Indians).
Tom Greer begins to see their point of view after his surrogate is destroyed and he is forced to live without a surrogate because the FBI suspects him of something wrong. He discovers that there is a plan to use this new weapon which liquifies the brains of the human controllers against the entire human race of surrogate users.
But in a twist of fate, Greer figures out how to do a mass killing of the surrogates but not their human controllers. Yea! Bruce saves the world again.
In both his surrogate form and human form, Willis is the big bad brave savior of the world he always is. If one thinks about the premise there are some interesting ideas that can come out of it. But this film isn’t really one of them. What would happen if we really lived only through surrogates? Would the world look like it does today but our interaction with each other be different? Would anyone get married? Would anyone create meaningful relationships? Would there be government control of how surrogates were made and how they acted? What would life really be like through surrogates? Would anyone not want to have a surrogate?
Overall: Conceptually there are some intriguing ideas available in this film, but they aren’t explored or engaged. This is a DVD rental on some lazy Sunday evening where walking away without hitting the pause button wouldn’t hurt.