So this was very badly reviewed but it does look slick enough and every once in a while I like to add a standard action movie into our queue because we don’t usually watch enough of them. I have no familiarity with the original source material at all but from what I understand it is supposed to be a lot more philosophically challenging than what we get here. Instead what we get is a retread of tropes we’ve been familiar with since Robocop and it’s not even an effective action movie.

In a future in which humans are routinely augmented with cybernetic implants, Major Mira Killian is supposedly the first of her kind: a human brain encased within a completely synthetic body. As a member of the elite Section 9, she fights against terrorists. The latest target is a mysterious figure known as Kuze who is attacking executives of Hanka, the robotics corporation that made her own body. To no one’s surprise, it turns out that the owner of Hanka, Cutter, is of course the real bad guy and the Major’s memories of her previous life as a refugee whose family was killed by terrorists is a complete fabrication. Egged on glitches that show glimpses of her real past and with clues provided by Kuze, her goal switches to uncovering who she really was before her transformation.

Even by Hollywood action movie standards, this is a hilariously clichéd plot with every single story beat not deviating in the slightest from the standard formula. I do like that the Major’s team remains loyal to her throughout which is rather pleasant though it would have been cool if the team members had been allowed to do more. What’s worse is that everyone involved in this production seems aware of how generic this is and so all of the performers are just phoning it in. It’s laughable for example how they try to give the Major a human moment by showing a scene of her feeding stray dogs but it’s half-hearted and there is no follow up at all. The relatively new director Rupert Sanders shows his ineptitude by having the final shot portray the Major as a Superman-like saviour, as my wife notes, when it would make much more of an impact to assert her humanity. This is how we know that this is a superficial action movie and has no aspirations whatsoever to be anything more.

All this might still be forgivable if it had delivered decent visuals and action scenes, but it doesn’t. The film plainly has enough of a budget to pretty much do anything it wants but mainly wastes it on making things look superficially slick without any part of it feeling real. Even if the Major’s body is meant to be synthetic, I’m sure that the intention wasn’t to make it look like a CGI creation utterly disconnected from her head. The shots that visibly look like Hong Kong work out quite well but the neon-saturated nighttime cityscapes utterly fail to convey any impression that this could be any kind of a real place rather than a videogame world. The action shots look cool but there’s zero sense of tension because we don’t really understand the full range of the Major’s abilities. For example, what’s stopping her from simply turning on her invisibility effect all the time?

Overall this film has enough impressive effects shots to cobble together a trailer that looks halfway decent but that is really all there is to it. It’s plainly the work of an inexperienced director with no real love of the material and a studio out to make a quick buck. It’s no wonder the distributors tried to hold back early reviews of it.