Total Recall Directed by Len Wiseman Nobody Else but You Directed by Gérald Hustache-Mathieu Total Recall without the fun accents and a bloodier My Week With Marilyn

It doesn’t feel quite right calling a film Total Recall when it doesn’t feature Mars, a stomach-sprouted man-baby, or a terrible Austrian actor yelling that people “need aye-ar!” Take those things away and we’re left with Len Wiseman’s remake of the 1990 Arnold Schwarzenegger hit, where along with polish we also get pedestrianism: The acting’s better, the effects and dialogue less cheesy—but now it’s a standard sci-fi snoozer, passable if you numb yourself to its multitudinous chases and remember not to focus on the plot.

Both films are loosely based on a short story by Philip K. Dick, this time interpreted by scripters Kurt Wimmer (Law Abiding Citizen) and Mark Bomback (Unstoppable). We’re in the future, and a company called Rekall claims it can implant any memory in your brain, so it’s as though you really had the experience. (Saves vacation expenses, marriages, etc.) In the original film, Schwarzenegger’s Douglas Quaid wants to visit Mars. Here, Colin Farrell’s Quaid merely wants to escape his drab factory job and the shack where he lives with—naturally—his gorgeous wife, Lori (Wiseman’s actual wife, Kate Beckinsale). Each day, Quaid and his friend Harry (Bokeem Woodbine) travel back and forth in an Earth-plunging Metro system while Quaid wonders if that’s all there is. On a lonely, beer-fueled night, he decides to check out Rekall, where he decides he wants the memories of a secret agent. The staff warns that if he’s lied about his life—specifically any actual past as a secret agent—things will go horribly wrong.

Sure enough, things do. Soon a gaggle of Stormtrooper-like soldiers infiltrate the place, and Quaid takes them out with ease. Enter the film’s WTF phase, as Quaid unravels his past, his marriage, and whether he’s really a spy known as Hauser who’s involved with a woman (Jessica Biel) he’s seen in his dreams.

In Wiseman and director of photography Paul Cameron’s hands, Total Recall’s world is crowded, stacked, and murky brown—like the dystopian first half and the utopian second half of WALL*E, but at the same time. Phones are implanted in palms and vehicles operate via magnetic force, a detail that yields one of the film’s coolest action sequences, in which a car disables the feature in order to freefall and re-enables it right before hitting one that’s parked, crushing it even though they never touch. Chase scenes and firepower are abundant; everyone has access to assault weapons and is adept at using them. And as anyone who’s seen Wiseman’s Underworld and Underworld: Evolution can attest, the director excels at making his spouse look good. Even when she’s fighting—which, after what feels like a mere minute, is always—Beckinsale’s Lori moves like Spider-Man with flowing hair and perfect makeup. Biel, at least, gets a sensible ponytail.

Farrell, meanwhile, drifts in and out of a vaguely English/Irish accent, but otherwise he’s a natural as the perpetually baffled Quaid. The character eventually gets schooled in the film’s warring-superpower politics, featuring a resistance leader (Bill Nighy) fighting the Man (Bryan Cranston), with both actors wasted in too-small roles. We also get more psychological mumbo jumbo, including something called a “paranoid dissociative break.” Whatever that is, fully enjoying this film probably requires that your mind take one.

Nobody Else but You Directed by Gérald Hustache-Mathieu

If its opening serenade is any indication, the French thriller Nobody Else but You wants to put a spell on us—but what we get feels less like magic than a fistful of Ambien. Writer-director Gérald Hustache-Mathieu’s plot reveals itself drip by drip, with lackadaisical storytelling and an anti-climax that leaves us shrugging rather than shocked.

It’s another Marilyn Monroe story, this time disguised as a whodunit. Or, rather, it’s a woman-who-thinks-she’s-Marilyn Monroe story. At the beginning of the film, Candice (Sophie Quinton), née Martine, is found dead clutching a pill bottle in snowy “Little Siberia,” a small French town named Mouthe. A struggling novelist, Rousseau (Jean-Paul Rouve), happens to be driving by as authorities recover the body. When he discovers who she is—a local weather girl as well as the spokesperson for a brand of cheese—along with the police’s determination that she committed suicide, the author gets an idea for his next book: He’ll investigate the case and present it as fiction.

Rousseau’s investigation goes pretty smoothly—way too smoothly to be believed. He talks his way into a morgue, for instance, and just happens to pick her corpse’s drawer on the first try. He finds Candice’s psychiatrist via a random directory-assistance call. (Rousseau asks for one name; the operator connects him to someone whose name is kinda sorta similar.) And a local cop, after telling him to mind his own business, soon becomes an ally. Eventually a mysterious figure goes after Rousseau, leading to the film’s one exciting sequence. But who this is remains an enigma, as does the movie’s strange motif: The number five appears everywhere, from Rousseau’s hotel room number to clocks to bowling-ball labels. (It’s probably a reference to Monroe’s quote about what she wears to bed: “Five drops of Chanel No. 5.”)

Rouve’s Rousseau may be a bore, a dull conduit through which we learn about the young woman, but when the luminous Quinton is on-screen and alive, the film sparks. This parallel plot details Martine’s transformation into Candice and her similarities to Monroe: She actually believes she’s the star’s reincarnation, insisting that Candice is just a public persona, a show for her fans.

Hustache-Mathieu takes the Monroe comparison too far, however, with wannabe-clever details that only feel more contrived as they pile up. (Bobby and John F. Kennedy are involved, for instance.) There’s a sprinkling of humor throughout Nobody Else but You’s script, but not enough to make it whatever Hustache-Mathieu was striving for. He wanted Fargo; instead we’re left with a lesser My Week With Marilyn.

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