All Will Smith’s Henry Brogan wants is to retire in Ang Lee’s muddled faux-cerebral actioner Gemini Man but perhaps it’s the once-celebrated director who should be submitting his resignation instead. The two-time Oscar winner is nearly unrecognizable in his new role as a beta-James Cameron techno-chaser, confusing higher frame rates, CGI Frankenstein creations, and 4k projection for the inklings of a passable story. But even if you remove the muddled slop-fest that is Gemini Man’s narrative out of the equation, you’re left with jumbled CGI-heavy action scenes and distinctly unsophisticated moral imperatives.

Lee’s last film, the utterly bungled Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, suffered a similar fate, leaning on boundary-pushing tech which ultimately was not to be. Theaters were unable to present the film as it was intended to be shown. Box office receipts suffered. Billy Lynn flopped hard, losing money and goodwill, and slightly reconfiguring Lee’s legacy. With Gemini Man’s costly reported budget weighing in at an uneconomical $138 million and word of mouth certain to peak at lukewarm, Lee’s filmmaking is becoming a gamble not worth pursuing. And now with reports that Gemini Man too will not be presented as intended, you have to stop and wonder why anyone is approving these projects that continue to be released their shambled format.

Written by Darren Lemke (Goosebumps), Billy Ray (Captain Phillips) and David Benioff (Game of Thrones), Gemini Man is disarmingly simple. The plot for this thing could be written on a cocktail napkin and still have room left over. Henry has a clone and that clone has been sent to kill him by a shadowy organization with loose ties to the government. That’s it. That’s the whole kit and caboodle. Benioff’s script reveals a movie that never moved beyond the elevator pitch, that remained the most basic version of what it was and could be.

As far as the visual effects that are supposedly the bread and butter of this creation, they too are lackluster, derivative and even downright prehistoric at times. There’s a motorcycle chase scene that should be embarrassed to exist in a post-Fallout world, some John Wick-wanna-be gun ballet, and extra gummy CG-loaded fisticuffs but all these action beat accouterments are in service of old Will Smith meeting young Will Smith, them punching and shooting at each other, and then ultimately teaming up. Cuz obviously.

For reasons unbeknownst to me, the always reliable Mary Elizabeth Winstead shows up in an absolutely thankless role as the female tagalong, getting lugged around on Henry’s globe-trotting rogue expedition, mostly to be used as bait. Clive Owen leads an organization trying to make super soldiers sans autonomy while Benedict Wong provides some form of comic relief as Henry’s pilot buddy ready with a good quip. They’re all just kind of there. But at least they are flesh and blood humans.

The film’s greatest accomplishment (if you really want to call it that) is the black magic used to create the Will Smith doppelgänger. Rather than use de-aging technology a la The Irishman or various Star Wars films, Gemini Man renders its own fully CG creation: a hermetically-sealed 25-year old fresh prince. The potential for this technology is scary, begging me to wonder what the real-world utility of Lee’s hyper-realistic deepfake could be. Fortunately, though CG Big Willie passes muster in the shadow, good god does it look bad in the light. One scene at the end of the movie is remarkably uncanny and honestly hard to look at. Seems as if the money source dried out a bit too early…

All in all, Gemini Man is just a nothing movie. It’s the airplane food of the cineplexes and about as dated as an airplane food joke. Though it’s being packaged as an action flick, the action elements are few and far between and as far as I was concerned mostly looked like garbage. Story-wise, the plot is as one-dimensional as they come, lacking any narrative or moral complexity and really only paying lip service to the ethical minefield that comes with cloning, the wear of being an assassin, and all the state-sponsored murder taking place. Lee’s is a film with nearly nothing on its mind and one that will immediately self-abort out of your own brain once you step out of the theater. Though it might be harder to forget day-lit CGI Will Smith quite so easily. The image very well might haunt you.

CONCLUSION: Will Smith continues his epic streak of terrible movies in the simple-minded and often poorly-staged wanna-be-cerebral thriller. Ang Lee’s talents as a director are incredibly misused as this flop-in-the-making just kind of sits there and dies on the screen.