Acid Re-Flux

In theory, watching the preview of Aeon Flux should be enough to keep you far, far away from the auditorium where it is playing, but living in a city with delusions that it is grander than it actually is one quickly discovers that sometimes there are no other options. This past weekend had only one major release and most of the limited release films haven't made their way here yet if ever. So, I went to this movie assuming it would be not so good. True to Hollywood form, the filmmakers were actually able to fail to meet my meager expectations.

From the opening frames one is treated to both an irritating expositional voice over and images of a rather bland, boring city. Regardless of whether the city of the future is a utopia or a distopia, clever film makers are able to design something worth looking at. Here it just looks like any city but with some funky fashions thrown in to let you know it's the future. In case you were spacing out during the expositional voice over, which I confess I may have done.

We meet our titular hero and see her do badass things and complete here mission and afterwards she learns her sister was killed because of it. Or was she? Because in the end I found myself a bit confused. Regardless, as any good hero she seethes and plots revenge. What follows for the movie is fairly standard action stuff with romantic subplots and revelations about the "bad" guy and the real bad guy. It was delightful to see Johnny Lee Miller who gnashes his teeth and plots as all really generic bad guys do.

Other actors of higher quality suffer here. Pete Postlethwaite so brilliant as Kobayashi in The Usual Suspects (1995) and as Guiseppe Conlon in In the Name of the Father (1993) is here completely wasted. Even Charlize Theron fresh off her Oscar win for Monster (2003) is retched in this film.

This film in the end falls on a convention of cloning. What's a sci-fi film without some good natured cloning? It seems to want to delve the murky waters of genetic memory, but doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense. Don't worry though, messy philosophic questions won't interupt our expected character arcs. Will the former friend who is now ordered to kill Aeon go through with it? Will the "bad" guy and the hero become romantically involved?

If you don't know the answer to these questions, I still recommend you stay far, far away from Aeon Flux. In the end the film felt much like an acid reflux incident. Painful and reminding you why you don't ingest crude like that on a regular basis.