Some day in the future — or is it right now? — people will be replaced by surrogate robots, superhuman automatons who live out big-screen fantasies while their hosts, with their greasy hair and bad skin, sit back in wired-up La-Z-Boys. With the real people off the streets, crime evaporates, and all looks utopian (even the streets of Boston, where the film was shot) until one of the stay-at-home "meatbags" gets his brain fried — and it's the son (James Francis Ginty) of the surrogates' inventor (James Cromwell).
FBI agent Greer (Bruce Willis) must abandon his toupéed double to solve the crime, which involves a Luddite revolutionary named the Prophet (Ving Rhames) and Greer's own domestic difficulties. Jonathan Mostow's characters look — intentionally? — like bad CGI, and that plus the affectless acting evokes an eerie unreality.
But the provocative Philip K. Dick-like premise deserves better than this warmed-over apocalyptic murder mystery.
