Z/Web

Pretty cool popcorn flick, if you can ignore major plot holes (like clones somehow growing into full adults in three years and looking exactly like their donors). The action is decent, the science fiction sets cool and interesting, and several of the characters are compelling. The luminous Scarlet Johansen steals the show. For once I liked that a film had a logical reason for why her character needed to be so beautiful: the clones are created as spare body parts for the rich and her donor is a beautiful, wealthy model. Unfortunately, the sparse script hints at depth but fails to take advantage of it. For instance, when Scarlet videophones her donor, her donor’s little boy answers the phone and says, “Is that you Mommy?” Later, she realizes that if she’s not killed for spare parts, her donor — the little boy’s mother — will die. That opened the door for an interesting conflict: guilt that your life will mean the death of another. Unfortunately, though the film hints at it in that one scene, it’s never brought up again. So the film that could have been brilliant ends up being okay. It’s got a few above average scenes (both in action and drama) that make better than most flicks of this kind, but it could have used this as an opportunity to make us think about it. I’d give it a solid B.