Reminiscence Rattles The Memory Gland, Makes No Sense

Reminiscence

Starring  Hugh Jackman, Rebecca Ferguson, Thandiwe Newton, Cliff Curtis,

Directed  by  Lisa Joy

Rating: * ½

Reminiscence Movie Review: As I waded  through  almost two hours of this shallow slush—and wade it is, as most  of the  film is set in submerged Miami—I felt myself cringing on behalf  of  Hugh Jackman.

Wolverine deserves  better than this  tacky third-rate  science  affliction….sorry, fiction with no  pace or grace. let alone  any friction. The  plot premise itself is  so  ridiculous I   wondered how Hugh got conned into being  part of this sham shindig.The zeroes on  the cheque? As some wise woman(Preity Zinta, actually) once told me, if you  continue  to count the zeroes on the cheque you  soon end up being a zero.

Jackman  will survive Reminiscence. I am not to  sure  about the audience. After being subjected to   the  preposterous plot  propulsions  and action scenes that  take the  joy away from the action and  replace it with a kind of frantic paranoia, I came away a  different  human being. It is not  often that  film is  so bad you wish  it would vanish. This one is it!

To get a grip on the plot you need iron handrails on your  patience. Jackman plays  Nicholas a memory  merchant who along with his pragmatic  partner Emily(Thandiwe Newton who makes so many faces to show  her martyrdom that  I felt like calming her down with sedatives). What they  do (besides annoying the hell out of us) is  to  revive  forgotten memories  of clients  who  wish to recall particular  incidents  from their past.

 What we  would like is a reverse  procedure where we can wipe out the memory of this monstrous  misfire. But before that , back to the plot  where  our hero Nicholas falls desperately and  hopelessly in love  with  a mysterious  smouldering club singer  Mae(Rebecca Ferguson, displaying unintentional comic timing) who  looks like  a distant cousin of Faye Dunaway in  Roman Polanski’s Chinatown.

Not that I am comparing this  curdled conundrum  with Polanski’s crime-noir classic. Just saying.Most  of the  film sees  Nicholas wading through tons of  water in this  soggy saga  of drowned passions, looking for his lost love Mae. His  pursuit  of love takes him to villains like Saint Joe(Daniel Wu) and  Cyrus Boothe(Cliff Curtis). Their  fights with Nicholas look tired,  jaded exhausted and exhausting.

Whether  Nicholas finds true  love or not is  irrelevant. Whether Hugh  Jackman will ever get  over  the  embarrassment of having done this  picture show  is the pertinent question. I can imagine Hugh  Jackman trying  desperately to hide this film  from his grandchildren  .

Nothing in Reminiscence is worth remembering. Not the  performances. Not the special effects(the memory-recall  episodes look as authentic as  fully prepared beds in departmental stores with  models  sleeping on  them ). Not the music. This  film should have  never been  approved at the  script level. The architects  of this time-travelling abomination owe us  an  apology.