#28 TRANSCENDENCE

#28 TRANSCENDENCE
Starring Johnny Depp, Morgan Freeman, Rebecca Hall, Kate Mara,  Cillian Murphy and Paul Bettany.

Directed by Wall Pfister. 120 minutes long

Depp is a scientist at the cutting edge of artificial intelligence and on the verge of a breakthru when he's shot with a bullet laced with Polonium and left with a month to live. Luckily his wife, fellow super-scientist, Rebecca Hall and best pal, (also a scientist, but this time of the medical kind), Paul Bettany are on hand to transfer his consciousness into a computer and before you can say, 'is it really him, or is it the computer?' we plunged into a world of either endless possibilities and enlightenment or total enslavement at the hands of a megalomaniacal computer and only a rag-tag army of anti-technologists, Morgan Freeman and Cillian Murphy stand between us and the end of everything as we know it, or are we? But since the entire film is told in flashback, apart from the opening scene we already know the outcome, so there's no real tension or drama in what follows, except for the obligatory twist ending - but that's giving it far too much credence, it's more of a oh, right, well that was sort of obvious - ending.

In between it's a slow, good-looking, ponderous film that languidly winds its way through the plot and it's 120 minute running time towards a hi-speed, dramatic chase involving gun ships and an all-female, topless, marine assault team willing to snog passionately with each other if it's going to save the world!

Sadly, it's only the first half of that paragraph that's truth, otherwise this film would be getting a totally different score than the one I'm going to stab thru it's boring, dull heart.

Old Depp-o almost avoids his obsession of defining his character by the hats they wear by wearing a skull helmet of brain implants for most of the film, he also spends 95% of the time as a head and shoulder hologram.

Characters disappear for huge chunks of the time only to reappear when they become salient to the plot again. There's little drama, or tension or real intrigue, at one point you get the sense that the plot is going somewhere else entirely different than it does. And yet this film starts off quite strongly and you're intrigued to know where it's heading. Trouble is, by the time Depp's character is surfing the web, you've sort of lost any interest.

4/10