Gemini Man Parent Guide

Henry Brogan (Will Smith) has been an assassin for an American intelligence agency for most of his adult life. The effects on him are adding up – insomnia, nightmares, and guilt – so he decides it’s time to retire. Unfortunately, it’s much harder to get away from his past than it was to get into it. Things only get more complicated when he realizes the shooter the agency has sent after him is…himself. With the help of Danny, who is the agent responsible for tailing him and is played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead, and his old friend Baron (Benedict Wong), Henry has to confront himself and the system that made him. Twice.

While Gemini Man has garnered attention for the pioneering CGI work that produced the young Henry Brogan, its other noticeable “feature” is its filming. The movie was shot at 120 frames per second (industry standard is 24), and then modified for 3D. Sometimes this works fantastically well. Slower, less mobile shots of cities and characters are ridiculously crisp and smooth. But then the camera starts moving quickly – like, say, in any of the film’s dozens of action shots - and suddenly you’re strapped into your seat for Ultra-3D Vomit Vision. This isn’t a movie for the dizzy or easily nauseated. At least not if you were planning to have a snack during the show. My advice? Keep that half-empty popcorn bag nearby. You might need it.

Since Gemini Man is an action movie, let’s talk about the action. The fight choreography is well done, for the most part. Sequences are memorable, easy enough to track, and have interesting adaptations to the settings and situations. The story is admittedly inferior. It’s very predictable, and not much happens that you wouldn’t have called twenty minutes in advance. That said, I don’t think Gemini Man was going out of its way to blow you away with slick dialogue and clever plotting. The story is an excuse for Will Smith to beat himself up on two different continents, and it delivers.

Gemini Man is well rated at PG-13, although there’s more drinking than you usually see in these movies. It’s not that anyone’s dancing naked on a table with a lampshade on their head, but it feels like any scene that doesn’t involve someone getting shot is an excuse for characters to have a quick drink. In fairness, it seems like being chased by government death squads would be stressful, to say the least. The violence is about what you’d expect, nothing too graphic or disturbing, just plenty of beatings and shootings. The profanity is the other area where things ramp up, with about a dozen moderate profanities and one sexual expletive.

So Gemini Man isn’t about to pick up a screenwriting award, not that it was trying very hard. The film is focused, to the exclusion of almost everything else, on its combat scenes and cinematography, but Will Smith and Mary Elizabeth Winstead manage to be charming enough on their own to make the rest of the movie watchable. At the end of the day, I’m just grateful they only threw in one Fresh Prince of Bel-Air joke. Things could have been much, much worse.