Vice (2015)

Summary
Julian Michaels 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 becomes self-aware and escapes, she finds herself caught in the crossfire between Julian's mercenaries and a cop who is hell-bent on shutting down Vice, and stopping the violence once and for all.

Genre : Action/SF
Country : USA

Cast :
Thomas Jane : Roy
Bruce Willis : Julian
Ambyr Childers : Kelly

Director : Brian A Miller

My opinion

I'm afraid that no film can push this abominable bad created movie of the first place in my "Best to avoid this film in 2015"-list. After watching appalling movies such as "The Cold Light of Day", "Fire with Fire", "Red 2", "The Prince" and "A Good Day To Die Hard", I was hoping to see the old Bruce Willis back again once more. However, what a disappointment. I'm convinced that senile senior citizens are showing more enthusiasm than Willis here. He is known by his nonchalant attitude and coolness in previous films, but the lack of interest that he's showing here and the total lack of facial expressions throughout the film (even up to the last fragment) defies all imagination.

This uninspired story is a mix of "Westworld", "Blade Runner" and "Groundhog Day". The only difference is that each of these three top films are a joy to watch and are based on an enjoyable and original idea. "Vice" is a sort of theme park for adults, populated by artificially intelligent robots that are indistinguishable from human beings. They can be in pain, have feelings and have a human body with high-tech features (not that you get to see it explicitly throughout the film). The format of the park is that visitors have total freedom and can do as they please. Do you want to murder a prostitute, cut a barmaid's throat or organize a gang rape of an innocent visitor at the local nightclub, you can go ahead safely with no adverse consequences. My first thoughts were : what kind of sick people visit this park and wouldn't it be better that such potential criminals are shipped immediately to some state prison. Anyway, it's all about entertainment for the crowd, I guess.

Everything goes smoothly and without any problems until Kelly (Ambyr Childers) starts getting flashbacks and relives crimes she was the victim of. Of course a reboot won't help and she's brought back to the workshop for maintenance. Now isn't that a surprise ? She gets the opportunity to escape (No way !) and with the help of Evan (Bryan Greenberg), the designer of all these artificial beings, she tries to escape to the real world. Furthermore, there's also the rebellious police officer Roy (Thomas Jane), whose biggest wish is to close down "Vice".

The concept offers opportunities but is certainly not very original. As Roy stipulates a few times : there's a possibility that visitors get to familiar with deeds they can do in the park and that they can't see the difference between the fictional world and reality. It could be that when they return to society, they start committing the same crimes over again. Besides naming this problem, there's nothing they do with this assumption. The self-awareness that arises in Kelly, isn't elaborated further. Ultimately, she's an ordinary blonde without external technical faults who tries to flee. Before you know it an hour has passed without any significant actions. It's all rather boring and tedious. To be honest I was struggling to keep my eyes open and it didn't matter to me anymore how it would end.

This is again a creation that can be added to Willis's palmares under the title "Complete nonsense" and you surely shouldn't waste any valuable time on it. The only positive point was those gorgeous ladies parading around. As an ultimate tribute here are some points that irritated me. For the umpteenth time a heroine manages to escape while being shot at by a small army of security agents. Even a bazooka couldn't prevent that. They'd better replaced these officers with artificial intelligent personnel. Look at those "Chappie"-robots. They never miss. Kelly had the opportunity to get an update at a given moment so she could acquire certain talents. The moment she decided to update herself, so she could join the others for some action, I was wondering what this upgrade was about anyway. Besides throwing some clumsy punches there wasn't much special to admire. But above all it's the demise of one of the action icons from the past, who plays one paltry role after the other. The only thing he shows in these roles are comatose glances and some mumbled dialogues. You want to see this charismatic and extremely cool action figure in action again, then I suggest you start up "Die Hard", "The Last Boy Scout" or "Twelve Monkeys" once again. Yippee ki yay ... uh .... whatever!