Not the best, but not the worst!

Rating: 6/10 (8 September 2012)

'Total Recall' is surprisingly good for an Arnold Schwarzenegger film (excluding the first two Terminator films of course). It's a sci-fi film about an ordinary man whose life turns out to be a lie, or does it?
In the beginning it isn't really explained that well but you begin to grasp the plot as it continues and the ending is very well written. The ending itself works really well because throughout the film you're trying to figure it out yourself. The ending does surprise you and has clearly been thought about in great detail by the writers as you don't really expect that ending. The sets and makeup are of course out-dated but the imagination used for the designs is a lot better than I had expected, particularly with some of the mutants on mars.
The acting is pretty poor; it lets the film down unfortunately. Schwarzenegger is weirdly the only decent performance in the film; this may be because you already expect his acting to be poor anyway. It is poor but everyone else overshadows his lack of acting capabilities. Sharon Stone was definitely the worst; having never seen any of her work apart from in a few television shows she really appalled me. Luckily, she doesn't have a great amount of screen time but her scenes are really really bad!
Overall, 'Total Recall' is certainly not the best sci-fi film ever but it's not the worst. It has strong violence and scenes of gore which you don't see much of nowadays in sci-fi or action films but it's not too much to divert your attention away from the story. The film is explained really well and is worth a watch.