Thinking man's Sci-fi actioner

Rating: Null/10 (18 April 2002)

About million years ago, (ten to be exact) I saw this movie and thought of it simply as `Hey, another Arnold shoot-em-up, bash-em-up' stuff. I was much younger and had less use of my brain. The latter was what I supposed to do for Arnold Schwarzenegger movies. Leave em out and enjoy the guilty pleasure.
But wait! Ten years forward and I got to see it again. What a surprise! The movie worked way better than it did. What better, I got to do thinking these days, and applied it in this movie with good results. This movie is certainly a thinking man's action sci-fi. No offence to non-thinking man, since it can still entertain too, as it did for me ten years back.
There is enough plot twist and turn in this Paul Verhoeven directed feature to make The Matrix look like an episode of Tom and Jerry. No offence to Tom and Jerry, of course. The story, based on Philip K. Dick's short story, never seem to date, and it gave Arnold a lot of excuse to actually er...act. You got me right. He actually did some serious acting in this movie. I'm serious. But what is an Arnold movie without Arnold being...Arnold. The violence is still pretty gory, but acceptable when it is okay with the story. Arnold usually doesn't punch bad guys. He THUMPS them. And here, he got to do more than that.
There are the usual special effects that made us go WHOA!!!' with capital letters those days. It still looks okay, but with a pair of eye trained to spot even the CGI scenes in Lord of the Ring, I felt a trifle uncomfortable with them. Just consider the era and you'll be fine. This movie is heaven sent for Arnold fan, and definitely worth checking out for non-Arnold fans. I think this is easily Verhoeven's best work. Yes, the violence, the campy dialogues and the one-liners are all there, but all in the name of fun and some serious thinking. Unravelling the plot, for a slow bugger like me, takes time, but it was worth the ride.

By the way, did I mention Sharon Stone is in this picture? Great huh? Well, don't get excited, she never strips. Almost, that is.