In the Flesh: The Creator

If you excised John David Washington from The Creator and replaced him with virtually any other semi-popular leading man in his age bracket, you might be able to scrape a good movie together around writer/director Garth Edwards’ and writer Chris Weitz’s unappetizing script. Madeleine Yuna Voyles gives one of the most earnest and unaffected child performances of the year as the one-of-a-kind child simulant Alphie, there’s fun world-building and design in abundance, and the whole thing clips along fast enough to avoid torpor. If the action scenes are repetitive, at least they’re also stylish, and if the dead wife guy stuff is microwaved leftovers from a hundred better movies, at least it doesn’t linger. There are neat gyroscopic cars and a handful of functional gags and neat little science fiction conceits. Allison Janney makes for an effective hardass military antagonist, amusingly abrasive and exasperated but still a believable threat.

But man, Washington stinks. A complete non-starter in virtually every way, and the inevitable comparison to his famous father Denzel is as unflattering as these things get. He lacks charisma, he has no physical presence, his affect is too broad and can veer into the slightly off-putting when the story clearly calls for vulnerability or edge. The script leaves a lot of room for the character of Taylor, room a better actor could have filled with facial acting and body language, with tone and attitude, but through the combined efforts of Edwards’ direction and Washington’s performance the film manages to fill absolutely none of it. Who is Joshua Taylor? A guy who says he’s sad about his wife a lot without ever really managing to sell it. Not exactly convincing as someone you’d hand-pick to serve as a deep cover double agent.

There’s also the matter of the score, which just plain stinks. When it’s not generic it’s flinging inexplicable Top 40 needle drops in your face or making a beeline for maximum cheesiness, undercutting what is perhaps Voyles’ best moment in the film as she pleads with Taylor not to launch the escape pod out of which he’s been locked by structural damage. Visually, though, The Creator has better CGI spectacle to offer than virtually anything else this year, not just in terms of its incredible explosion effects but on a more intimate scale with scuffed and broken-in retro-futuristic technology and elegant fusions of archetypal Buddhist and Hindu imagery with well-realized iterations of classic Golden Age sci-fi robot designs. It’s a smorgasbord of exciting ideas and images completely unsupported by limp, vague, self-contradictory exposition, confused metaphors for real-world oppression, and leaden, underexplored performances.