This is a movie all about how
Will’s life got cloned and turned upside down
I’d liked to take a minute and explain right here
And tell you how Old Will fought the Prince of Bel Air.

Henry Brogan (Will Smith) is an assassin and spy who is ready for retirement. If you’ve ever seen a spy movie, you know they can never retire. Deep down, assassins are nice people even though they’ve spent a lifetime killing people. Don’t worry about all the murder. One, it’s for the government so that makes it OK. Two, Brogan has 72 confirmed kills. It’s not like he killed hundreds of people. Just 72. And now he wants to spend his days fishing.

Brogan can’t retire because his last job was a set up. He killed the wrong guy. Who can he trust? Everybody. He actually trusts every single person he meets in the movie. He has a few old friends. We can call them Bad Boss, Collateral Damage One, Collateral Damage Two, Collateral Damage Three, and Rookie Lady Spy. Suddenly, his associates are being killed off one-by-one. He’s next.

Who would try to kill the most unkillable hitman in the world? His clone.

Brogan immediately trusts his doppelganger. Because it’s himself. It turns out that the murderous clone assassin is a really nice kid. Nevertheless, they still fight each other for half the movie.

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In wet petri dish born and raised
On the military compound where I spent most of my days
Chillin’ out, maxin’, relaxin’ all cool
And having daddy issues because my fake dad is cruel.

Junior is 100 percent Henry Brogan DNA, but raised by Brogan’s archenemy (Clive Owen). Junior is 30 years younger than Old Will, and he sports a high-top fade. The hair style is so happily “Fresh Prince of Bel Air” that I wondered if Junior was a clone or time-traveler or a 1990’s pop culture scholar. Alas, Junior is not from West Philadelphia, but Georgia.

A couple of clones who were up to no good
Started makin’ trouble in my neighborhood
They got in one long fight and Fight Club got scared
“We can only tell you apart ‘cause of the cut of your hair.”

Director Ang Lee wants us to have a visually stunning viewing experience so we believe the clone is real. He’s completely computer generated. The movie might be interesting because you can’t stop looking at fake Will Smith. Fake Will Smith is expressive. His eyes crinkle, he cries, he bleeds.

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To improve the viewing of this authentic CGI, Lee filmed the movie in 4K 3D 120 fps. That’s four times the resolution (4K) of high definition in 3D with 120 frames per second (fps). Only a few theaters in the US can play the movie close to the way he intended, so I traveled to a theater that offered the enhance viewing experience at 2K 3D 120 fps. That is double the resolution (2K) of high definition. For perspective, a regular movie might be 24 frames per second, and an IMAX around 48 frames per second, maybe up to 60. To see the true 4K experience with 120 fps, I’d have to fly to Asia to see it. Alpharetta was far enough.

The goal of the technology was to render Junior as human as possible so they’d only have to pay Will Smith once. Junior lacked the fluidity and asymmetry of a real actor. He was too precise. His skin tone wasn’t right. He wasn’t real. He was stilted. Ang Lee relied on facial expression and tears. Lots of tears. Junior might have been a clone, but he could cry. The team seemed to spend every dollar creating that clone face, but nothing on script or cinematography. If you’re going to use the fancy camera, at least give me one sweeping view of Budapest.

Looked at my kingdom, I was finally there to sit on my throne as the Prince of Bel-Air.

When you go to the fancy theater, your seat vibrates when there’s an explosion on screen. I’m so used to the economy theater, I didn’t know how to act at the good AMC. Y’all, vibrating seats cannot save a movie.

See it at home. A perfect movie to watch while folding laundry. “Yo homes, smell ya later!” Grade C.

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