Imposter
dir. Gary Fleder
Opens Fri Jan 4
Various
Gary Sinese was on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart the other day pimping his new movie, Impostor, and I was psyched. Not because of Mr. Grimace Sinese, but because the film is based on psycho sci-fi author Philip K. Dick’s story of the same title. For those under a rock, PKD was a drugged-out paranoid looney with an unhealthy obsession with the validity of reality–the subject of most of his writing, including the film adaptation of Impostor. But, unlike Blade Runner and Total Recall, this Phildickian adventure sucks, coming off more akin to a bad episode of Gene Roddenberry’s Earth: Final Conflict.
In our little fantasy, it’s a hundred-odd years from now, and Earth has been involved in a prolonged war with aliens from Alpha Centauri, who have decimated most of the planet in their attempt to erase the blight that is the human race. Humanity, in response, has developed into an ultra-paranoid military machine, not unlike PKD’s version of the world at the time. Spence Olham (Gary Sinese) is a scientist developing a secret super-weapon for use against the bastard Centauris. While minding his P’s and Q’s at the lab one day, he is taken into custody by Major Hathaway (Vincent D’Onofrio), head meanie of CIA Futuro, who accuses Olham of being an evil Centauri android doppelganger hell-bent on blowing us all sky-high with the super space bomb (of course) implanted in his chest, which can only be removed through vivisection by some yucky whirling blade thingee. Obviously, our hero’s not going for that, cuz he’s human, goddammit, and even though he’s a puny egghead scientist, he manages to overcome Major Hathaway and his 53 guards and disappear through an air vent in Hathaway’s ultra-high-security Spanish Inquisition lair.
The rest of the movie is boring chase scene after chase scene, with Olham eluding the Feds via vent after grill after convenient fucking duct, trying to find some way to prove himself human. Sigh.
When they finally catch Olham, it’s supposed to be a big surprise ending, but since we already knew what was going to happen, it wasn’t a surprise at all. Ultimately, I was relieved when all the main characters and everything else within a ten-mile radius blew up. If only it were real. Oh yeah, Madeleine Stowe’s in it too. And she’s hot.