Vice: Blu-ray Review
The Movie:
Julian Michaels (Bruce Willis) has designed the ultimate resort: VICE, where anything goes, and the customers can play out their wildest fantasies with artificial inhabitants who look, think and feel like humans. When an artificial (Ambyr Childers) becomes self-aware and escapes, she finds herself caught in the crossfire between Julian’s mercenaries and a cop (Thomas Jane) who is hell-bent on shutting down VICE, and stopping the violence once and for all.
From the start the film felt very familiar and then I realized what it was. The premise felt a lot like Total Recall meets Surrogates (which was another Bruce Willis flick) besides the AI becoming self aware. The story however was actually pretty decent and had some good little twists. In this film Willis fills the role of the villain which is a departure from his usual leading man roles. He played it straight and with a calm tone which is still pretty intimidating and scary at times. Jane on the other hand plays his role much like his other roles. In fact if you were to mix footage of this film with any other of his films you probably wouldn’t be able to know the difference but that’s not to say he was bad it’s just exactly what you would expect from him. Childers was pretty good and had some great scenes with Jane and Willis but towards the third act her line delivery started to feel kinda campy and almost superhero-ish which was a bit weird. All in all it was an entertaining film but lacked some originality. I will say that it is worth checking out if you’re in the mood for a sci-fi film that requires not much set up. 6/10
Special Features:
Commentary with Director Brian A. Miller and Actors Ambyr Childers and Bryan Greenberg
Behind the Scenes of Vice – A decent 13 minute look at the making of the film with interview snippets here and there.
Interviews with Cast and Crew – Pretty self explanatory but the only cast member not present was Willis for some reason.
