Deckard's Midnight Runners

Rating: 7/10 (16 December 2019)

Looking back at an old review of mine for "Blade Runner", certainly one of the highest rated films here, I can see I wasn't quite convinced by it. Thinking it may have been more me than the movie, taking the chance to watch this much belated but certainly much anticipated follow-up, I determined to take my time with it, pretty essential considering its 163 minute length, and really try to digest and appreciate it.
I must admit I found the plotting a little difficult to follow, but just about got there in the end. Ryan Gosling is in the lead part as K a replicant hunter working for his unforgiving boss Robin Wright, who starts to suspect that he himself is a replicant born of a replicant mother, with its wider implications for any humans v replicants conflict in the future.
It's not long before the trail leads him to Harrison Ford's Agent Deckard, the suspected father of the lost child and therefore maybe his own father, but both hunters are themselves being hunted by a murderous female assassin, inappropriately named Luv (Sylvia Hoeks), employed by the villainous Wallace Corporation whose blind, in more ways than one, leader has his own agenda as regards the preservation of the status quo in society.
There's not a lot of dialogue in the film and what there is, tends more to the monosyllabic, which gives the viewer time to take in the excellent sets, including a massive space-junkyard, the slumdog shantytown populated by child-slaves and the once-upon-a-time luxurious Las Vegas hotel where Deckard is now holed up. The special effects are also impressive ranging from the large-scale, like when K's space-mobile crashes, to the small-scale holographic visuals when K's holographic girl-friend is superimposed onto a real prostitute for a love-making scene, the recreation of Sean Young's Rachael character from the original film and even the Frank and Elvis images which return to their old Vegas stamping-ground to entertain Deckard in his solitude. There are also two effective death scenes, one short and very much to the point, the other extended and climactic under crashing waves.
I couldn't fault the acting either. Gosling, Wright, Hoeks and Ford's characters are all different shades of humourless, world-weary, intensity in this bleak afterworld but each personalises their performance into effective dare I say human individuals. There's also a suitably moody electronic soundtrack adding atmospheric weight and even a nod to Vangelis's original soundtrack at the end.
Ridley Scott, the director of the first "Runner" and who executive-produced 2049, felt the final cut here could have lost half an hour which might have helped the movie's disappointing box-office but I'm glad we got to see new director Villeneuve's grand if dark vision of how this particular story should play out.
If there is to be a third entry in the series, let's hope it doesn't take another 36 years to materialise otherwise it will have to be a holograph of me who reviews it!