Same feeling........that had it been released 25 years ago, this movie might have been all the rage, a dazzling delight for fanboys and fangirls......
But now? Today? The movie smells like stale leftovers.......like junk food you parked way in the back of the fridge since God knows when and you just came across.........you can try eating it cold, but proceed at your own risk.
We will not put anyone, including ourselves, into a deep coma discussing the film's origins as a beloved, celebrated Japanese anime epic........and all the swirling controversy over casting Scarlett Johansson as a Japanese girl who gets her brain implanted in a robotic body that bears a striking resemblance to.....oh my.....Scarlett Johansson's body.
The Johannson casting came down to a simple economic equation......Scarlett plus skin tight outfits plus superheroics equal box office cash. Asses in seats, as they say. You don't have to take notes. It's just basic movie business greed.
So we're back in Big Future City, heavily influenced by Big Evil Corporation, who decorate the town with jumbo holograms the size of Macy's parade balloons. (Unlike "Blade Runner"s L.A., there's no rain, no teeming throngs and nary a noodle bar in sight.....)
Scar-Bot, now weaponized as a super terrorist fighter by Big Evil Corporation, kicks off her crime-fighting with that groan-inducing cliche......the CGI free fall off a tall building. Which would have been really cool if we hadn't already seen it in the last two hundred superhero movies......
Naturally, as you'd expect, Scar-Bot finds out she's nothing but an innocent pawn in the nefarious plots of the Evil Corporate Executive of the Big Evil Corporation. For all we know, this outfit might be a subsidiary of "Resident Evil"s Umbrella Corporation.......you know, like the new Disney-Fox mashup......
Mayhem ensues.......with Scar-Bot shooting and kung-fu-ing many, many Big Evil Corporate Minions into oblivion, with the help of her Big Sidekick, who looks like a steroid-pumped Kiefer Sutherland. (Big Sidekick, at some point, gets his eyeballs blown out and replaced with robotic bottle-caps, in keeping with the film's idea of mechanical upgrades for one and all.....)
That's it......we'd start nodding off if we described any more of this film. For anyone who wants or needs another guided tour through the every special effect action sequence you've seen in the last 20 years.......well, here it stands.
For us, a major struggle to stay awake through it. We'll grudgingly graft on.......
......1 & 1/2 bottle-cap eyeballs (* 1/2) Appropriate title, though...."Ghost In The Shell". An empty shell of a movie, stuffed with ghosts of movies you've already seen.....
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