If you’ve been living in a cave in one of Tajikistan’s more remote provinces, there’s a small chance you didn’t hear about Will Smith slapping Chris Rock at the 2022 Academy Awards. The smack, issued in response to a joke about Smith’s wife, dominated headlines and social media chatter. Smith was banned from the Oscars for a decade, his ongoing movies were canceled or delayed, a 5,500-word Wikipedia page was written, and questions were raised about Smith’s continuing viability as a movie star. Then he starred in Bad Boys 4 and made a big bag of money.
This was not the first time Will Smith responded to career challenges by retreating to the Bad Boys-verse. The last few years of Smith’s work may have been framed around his viral moment, but he’d already been on shaky ground following a parade of crud that included Suicide Squad (the bad one), Bright, and Collateral Beauty. Remember the movie where Smith exchanges letters with Love, as personified by Keira Knightley? No? Only Bad Boys 3 righted Smith, and it arrived just a year after Gemini Man, a nadir that felt like Smith collectively slapping unsuspecting moviegoers.
The sci-fi thriller, released five years ago today, stars Smith as Henry Brogan, the best assassin America has. He retires after one last job but learns a state secret that forces his handlers to liquidate him. He survives the attempt, of course, so the villainous Clay Verris (Clive Owen, inexplicably given the name of a middling college football quarterback) must activate his deadliest asset: a young Brogan clone.
This twist, that the only man badass enough to stop Will Smith is a digitally de-aged Will Smith, dominated the marketing campaign. It’s a delightfully silly premise, and there should be some meaty drama in the fact that Verris, once Brogan’s commanding officer, raised “Junior” like a son. But it’s all just... bad.
It's not like there wasn’t talent here. Smith, even at his Collateral Beauty-ist, is still Will Smith, a man capable of effortless charisma. Director Ang Lee has a spotty filmography, but his hits are grand slams. David Benioff, one of three credited screenwriters, may never escape mockery for mishandling the Game of Thrones finale, but he’s no slouch with a pen. Legitimately fun moments, like a chase through colorful Colombian streets and a brawl in a Hungarian catacomb, hint at wasted potential.
But with Gemini Man having been in the works since 1997, it felt like everyone just wanted to get the damn thing out the door. Too many shootouts are bland, and too much dialogue is rote. Mary Elizabeth Winstead is misused as a fellow agent who’s given little to do, and the quips of Brogan’s old comrade (played Benedict Wong) are so hesitant you get the feeling he wasn’t sure if he was supposed to be joking around with an endeavor as serious as Gemini Man. Worst of all, Smith is given precious few chances to be himself. The scenes where he turns on his charms are effective, but Brogan and Junior are ultimately such generic action heroes that the movie ends up feeling like an unusually ambitious production from WWE Studios.
Maybe it’s a bit mean-spirited to recap every flaw of a five-year-old failure, but Smith’s willingness to be the man who dragged this dying film across the finish line says something about where his career was at. He was still big enough to headline a movie, but not dominate one. After all, what had his last true hit been? The live-action Aladdin made bank but had the staying power of a flea fart. Attempts at more serious fare, like Concussion and Focus, were woefully misguided. After Earth was... After Earth. The man was desperately searching for dramatic critical acclaim, but what he needed was a script that let him shoot off guns and quips.
Gemini Man continued Smith’s downturn by flopping, and it’s not hard to see why. The whole affair feels more like a perverse fable about persistence than a coherent thriller. The movie waded through the depths of development hell for so long that many of the actors and directors considered for the project didn’t live to see its debut, and they didn’t miss much. Ironically, Gemini Man probably could have used even more time in the oven. The de-aging techniques used on Junior are only sporadically convincing, and rewatching it just leaves you wondering what could be done with the premise today — or whether Hollywood should have been warned off of de-aging entirely.
Smith’s career could have hit a new low after Gemini Man, but he gamely delved back into the Bad Boy mines and emerged with Bad Boys For Life, his biggest hit in a generation. Not everyone escaped unscathed — Ang Lee hasn’t directed another film since — but the duo left behind a fascinatingly terrible movie with an important lesson. Sometimes, when you’re going through hell, it might be smarter to just give up and retreat to safety.
