Reminiscence (2021)

 Score: 2.5 / 5

A man whose job is to sift through other people's memories gets embroiled in a mystery, searching an urban wasteland for a troublesome woman while descending the echelons of criminality. Put it any way, and there's nothing groundbreaking about the rote plot, which is largely ripped from any number of classic noir movies. And that's okay, generally, if it's specific and detailed enough to still hold one's interest and curiosity. Noir movies largely exist today because of their embrace of science fiction, and Reminiscence seems determined to fit within that niche. But this is no Blade Runner or Minority Report, and this one can't quite make its mark without relying heavily on its conscious references to those earlier works.

Hugh Jackman plays Nick, a haunted man whose gravelly, world-weary voice narrates the movie like a Bogart impersonator. He lives in a sunken world, a stretch of Miami coast mostly underwater after climate change flooded the land and made daytime impossibly hot. His demimonde consists of a Venice-like shadowy world in which his routine involves boating to work in a cavernous warehouse to help sad clients relive their pasts. Using a memory recalling device that looks like a giant spider web of clear cables, he plops his clients into a tube of fluid and verbally guides them into their past. Sometimes it's simply to help someone find lost keys or remember a date; more often, it seems, it's to let someone indulge their masochistic melancholia by torturously reliving a happy memory, perhaps of a loved one since passed away. The latter cases he tends to warn, saying that "the past can haunt a man" and encouraging them not to live through these memories and forget to move on.

Nick and Watts, his ex-military business partner (played by a typically reliable Thandiwe Newton), are close friends, despite her addiction to alcohol and his addiction to, I guess, moodiness. It's a little creepy that they can see the memories of their clients, but the clients don't seem to care. Until one day, when the femme fatale, Mae, appears in a revealing crimson dress to push his buttons; she asks Nick to stay after hours to help her find her keys. He's clearly taken instantly -- who wouldn't, especially by the stunning Rebecca Ferguson all gussied up and doing her best Lauren Bacall or Barbara Stanwyck style of sultry seduction. The distinctly tragic jazz singer even sings his favorite sad song in a jazzy alto voice, and he's off to the races in a steamy romance that never manages to feel believable beyond its eroticism. And then, suddenly, she disappears with nothing but a few clues and depressing memories.

Where did she go? And why does she feature in the memories of a comatose suspect being prosecuted as a mule for drug kingpin Saint Joe? After seeing this, Nick learns that Mae was a narcotic addict, and he's off again, this time to hunt down the criminals. Unfortunately, as is so often the case in the genre, the crime extends far beyond a single man, and Nick struggles -- as do we -- in a turbulent quagmire of corrupt cops and lawyers, drug fiends, and politicians and businessmen desperate to stay dry in a wet world. As unrest grows in the lower classes, Nick inadvertently reveals damning truths about the "barons" in power, and by the end I cared more about the peripheral uprising than about Nick chasing a scar-faced killer.

Apart from its derivative science fiction elements -- which are pretty bare-bones anyway, relegated to the limited "money shots" of CGI -- even the noir aspects of Reminiscence aren't novel. I found myself spacing out of the movie, more interested in ticking off its repeated visual references to Vertigo and other Hitchcock films, to say nothing of Chinatown, The Maltese Falcon, and of course the obvious inspiration Total Recall. The ludicrously complex plot here -- not helped by constant references to characters we haven't met yet and won't be properly introduced to us -- is far more distracting than any of the visual successes the movie displays. I'll never remember the plot of this flick (except a creepy man hunting for his boss's bastard child, which I'm not even certain was really happening) and that's probably a good thing.

I might remember some of its platitudes about time and the dangers of nostalgia, but its sentimental platitudes delivered in voiceover have thankfully vacated my own memory. I will remember, however, the splendor of a drowned city, a memory recall device in fiber optic cables, and a gag-inducing few remarks that tried to thematically link this story to the Orpheus and Eurydice myth. Oh, and a very sad Hugh Jackman who just needed a hug.