Huge disappointment

Rating: 4/10 (11 November 2012)

Remake of a foreign film, VS is the story of a publisher who has a bad car accident and wakes up to a severely altered reality. The remake is a vehicle for Cruise, who is shown in loving closeup through a large part of the movie. His character stumbles through this altered reality, meeting a beautiful Spanish woman (Cruze) and a sympathetic police psychologist (Russell). He also encounters a strange little man who tries to coax him back into reality. Cruise has always been an acquired taste at best, much like Nic Cage and Keanu Reeves, so your tolerance for this uninspired remake will depend on your affinity for Cruise. What makes the film a bitter disappointment is the last 20 minutes, in which everything that has happened to the bewildered publisher is spelled out in excruciating detail by the strange little man, whose real name is Tech Support (are you starting to get it?). At this point, the film sharply veers away from surreal fantasy into pure sci-fi, and unfortunately its twist ending has been used many times before, sometimes successfully (as in STAY) and more often not. Cruise is simply hammy beyond belief here. If you want to see Cruise actually act, check out the ensemble flick he did several years ago in which he played a horndog motivational speaker. Now, that's acting!