The Total Recall reboot is only halfway through its shoot, but director Len Wiseman and cast halted production in Vancouver to make the trip to San Diego – and they brought an impressively lengthy piece of footage with them.
It began with hero Douglas Quaid (not be confused with Dennis, or Randy, who's still eluding those wily Star Whackers), played by Colin Farrell, paying a visit to the shady McClane (not to be confused with John), played by a peroxided John Cho, a merchant who sells “brain vacations”.
Quaid wants to enjoy some simulated espionage, but as he’s plugged into a virtual-reality device an alarm blares. Turns out the system has determined that he’s already a spy, and a cadre of futuristic shock-troops turn up. Using martial-arts moves he didn’t know he had, Quaid cuts swathes through them and manages to escape through a vent, ending up hanging by his fingertips above a vertiginous drop.
It all looked more faithful to the Phillip K. Dick novella that inspired the first Total Recall, We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, and was very slick, with many of the visual effects already appearing fine-tuned, particularly one series of shots in which the future-cops fire dozens of tiny, ball-shaped cameras into the room, using them to create a 3D hologram which can pinpoint Quaid’s position. One of them, painfully, ends up in our hero’s arm, forcing him to yank it out.
The project as a whole still seems like an oddity, and it’s yet to be seen whether it can match the Paul Verhoeven classic. (With all due respect to Len Wiseman, his work is not renowned for its smarts or subversive wit.) But on the plus side **Total Recall **2012 does have a crackerjack cast, which aside from Farrell boasts Jessical Biel, Kate Beckinsale and Bryan Cranston. All of whom were on witty form during the panel.
“I play an Austrian ex-pat who rises to prominence in the world of body-building, before become a film star and learning that’s not a stable basis for a career in politics,”quipped Farrell, putting himself on Arnie’s hit-list.
Beckinsale, asked if she’s nervous about following in Sharon Stone’s footsteps by playing Quaid’s wife, replied, “I do now!” Before blowing every man in the room’s mind by purring, “I’m doing the [Basic Instinct] pose under the table right now.”
The best line of the panel, though, came from Cranston. “I haven’t changed a bit,” he said, when asked how his newfound Breaking Bad fame has affected him. “My butler still puts my pants on one leg at a time. I was just talking about this with my limo driver on the way here…”