Reviews for this film from our members:
- [New – 1/24] | Dragan Antulov @ Draxblog VI [Croatian]
- Rick Aragon @ Rick’s Cafe Texan
- Excerpt: I can’t say that Total Recall was terrible. I can only say it wasn’t very good.
- Alan Bacchus @ Daily Film Dose
- Jason Bailey @ DVD Talk
- Excerpt: Though it is wildly unnecessary and certainly less than memorable, for a good stretch, this ‘Total Recall’ is sleek and fast and unabashedly entertaining.
- Tim Brayton @ Antagony & Ecstasy
- Excerpt: Considering what a commanding majority of the film’s running time is made up of large-scale action scenes and chases in CGI environments, it’s disastrous that only one of them is any good.
- Patrick Bromley @ F This Movie!
- Kevin Carr @ 7M Pictures
- Excerpt: Taken in a vacuum, “Total Recall” is a passable early-August actioner with some exciting scenes and enough of the original’s spirit to make it work. Did I want it to be better? You betcha. But at this time of the year, you can’t expect perfection.
- Stephen Carty @ Flix Capacitor
- Laura Clifford @ Reeling Reviews
- Excerpt: …the creator of the “Underworld” series has made a a dreary looking action flick short on logic and human connection.
- Jim Dixon @ Examiner.com
- Excerpt: There’s an old Hollywood adage that you can imitate Hitchcock, but you can’t remake him. The same may be true of Arnold Schwarzenegger. An Arnold-less remake of “Conan the Barbarian” tanked last summer, and this summer’s iteration of “Total Recall” is essentially a paler, rainier imitation of Paul Verhoeven’s 1990 kitsch classic.
- Mark Dujsik @ Mark Reviews Movies
- Excerpt: Logic is in short supply in Total Recall.
- Kate Erbland @ Boxoffice Magazine
- Candice Frederick @ Reel Talk
- Excerpt: It’s gloriously ridiculous, just the way you ordered it.
- Cynthia Fuchs @ PopMatters
- Excerpt: Movie remakes always recall what came before, and given that this one recalls a movie about recalling — and remaking — its drawing attention to these very activities might have been clever.
- Bill Gibron @ PopMatters
- Excerpt: This update… may be more high tech and ostentatious, but it pales in comparison to the crazy quilt camp of the original.
- Susan Granger @ www.susangranger.com
- Excerpt: A total waste of time.
- Vadym Grygoriev @ kinoblog.com [Ukrainian]
- MaryAnn Johanson @ FlickFilosopher.com
- Excerpt: Solid B-grade processed-cheese-product movie junk food.
- Jennie Kermode @ Eye For Film
- Excerpt: This recalls the words of Nicol Williamson’s unforgettable Merlin: “A dream to some. A nightmare to others.”
- Benjamin Kramer @ The Voracious Filmgoer
- Wesley Lovell @ Cinema Sight
- Excerpt: What pass for plot developments seem to be set pieces designed to drive the action from point A to B to C and so on. The paint-by-numbers structure makes it hard to find someone or something worth getting excited over.
- Glenn Lovell @ CinemaDope.com
- Joe Lozito @ Big Picture Big Sound
- Excerpt: You’ll want to remember the sci-fi futurescape but forget the plot in this “Recall” reboot.
- Piers Marchant @ Sweet Smell of Success
- Excerpt: Yes, the three-breasted babe is well repped; I only wish the filmmakers had cared about anything else in the bloody thing.
- Peter Martin @ Twitch
- Mike McGranaghan @ The Aisle Seat
- Excerpt: When the first version of this story to hit the big screen was so enjoyably effective, why does one need to bother with a vastly inferior version of the same thing?
- Jason McKiernan @ Next Projection
- Excerpt: There are greater sins then concocting a blistering, incessant, balls-to-the-wall digi-action picture, but it’s hard to get too excited when the material has the potential for so much more.
- Brent McKnight @ Beyond Hollywood
- Excerpt: Total Recall isn’t particularly noteworthy, but neither is it terrible.
- Ryan McNeil @ Total Recall
- Excerpt: The strangest thing about waking up from a dream? It’s surprisingly tricky to go back to sleep and fall back into the same dream.
- Simon Miraudo @ Quickflix
- Darren Mooney @ the m0vie blog
- Excerpt: Len Wiseman’s Total Recall is a total mess. While the film features some superb production design and some passable action sequences, with an obvious affection for the design of contemporary science-fiction classics, the direction is muddled,the pacing is awkward and the script is constantly tripping over itself. At one point it’s suggested that the lead might have had has memory scrambled during a muddled recall session, the result of procedure started and yet not quite finished. In many ways, that feels a lot like what happens here – a choppy, uneven and unsatisfying movie that is a result of a muddled production and post-production process. “We can remember it for you,” an advertisement for the Rekall service boasts, homaging the classic short story that inspired the film. Unfortunately, they omitted “wholesale”, which is about the only price I could recommend this at.
- Kenneth Morefield @ Christianity Today Movies and TV
- Excerpt: Total Recall makes little demands on the viewer’s attention or concentration while blowing lots of stuff up and reassuring us that no matter how extensively we’ve been brainwashed, the difference between actual terrorists and revolutionary freedom fighters who have just had that label hung on them by fascist, bloodthirsty government officials will be apparent to anyone who is at heart a good guy.
- Mark Pfeiffer @ Reel Times: Reflections on Cinema
- Kevin Ranson @ MovieCrypt.com
- Excerpt: … the machines from I, Robot hitch a ride on the magma train from The Core to invade the world of Blade Runner for the benefit of the citizens living in The Fifth Element?
- Jamie S. Rich @ DVD Talk
- Excerpt: es, yet another Hollywood remake of a film that’s not even that old, but relax: Paul Verhoeven’s 1990 version of Total Recall is probably not as good as you remember and Underworld mastermind Len Wiseman’s 2012 redo is better than you probably expect it to be. Somewhere in the middle is justification for going to this well again. Besides, neither film is much like Philip K. Dick’s 1966 short story upon which both are based. Purity of vision is as murky as Douglas Quaid’s memory.
- Jerry Roberts @ Armchair Cinema
- Excerpt: Good special effects at the service of a story that means nothing.
- Tom Santilli @ Examiner.com
- Excerpt: Has Hollywood seriously ran out of fresh ideas? Why are we still asking this question? Just take a look at Total Recall and you’ll find the answer.
- Amir Siregar @ Flick Magazine [Indonesian]
- Phil Villarreal @ OK Magzine
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