Aggressively Incoherent

Rating: Null/10 (2 April 2009)

I couldn't spoil the plot of this movie if I wanted to... even though I've seen it 40 times since it's 1990 release I have yet to decide if the filmmakers had an actual, logical story in mind or just decided to numb the viewer with twists, effects and lots of things that go boom. The answer is, it doesn't matter.
"Total Recall" stands as a definitive 90's action film... just enough substance to set up the fight scenes, explosions and laser-blasts. Every generation throws a mono-syllabic action hero to the top of the box office, and the 90's answer to John Wayne or Sylvester Stallone was unanimously-elected Arnold Schwarzenegger, who never met a bad guy or a sentence that he couldn't mangle. Arnie's accent and muscle-borne stiffness seemed to oddly liberate the creative minds in the directors and producers with whom he worked, from James Cameron's two "Terminators" to John McTiernan's "Predator."
He works the same magic in "Total Recall," a movie that resembles a PCP-induced hallucination: The Future... on Mars... multiple identities... paranoid delusions... It's like a big bag of buttery popcorn: delicious while it lasts, but no nutritional value.
And popcorn's okay, from time to time, but I wouldn't want to live on it. Thanks to crisp cinematography and its "elusive" plot, "Total Recall" still survives today as an exciting action flick. What are you waiting for? Get your ass to Mars...
GRADE: B