For once a genre movie that's got a brain & plenty of action (Rating: 5.00)
Review : Very cool film with one of the best ticking clocks ever.The hero, a guy whose body's been stolen by a terrorist, has three days to find himself before he dies.Kyle MacLachlan gives one of his best performances ever. When he finds out his body ain't coming back, you feel his pain! Stephen Baldwin's pretty good, too, as the clone body Maclachlan has to borrow & proceeds to trash like a rental car.And Pascale Bussieres, where'd she come from?Beautiful, sexy, smart, really good actress.There's lots of good future-shock touches to tell us we're not in Kansas anymore, like gadget boutiques that sell weapons to executives (check out the "protonic monofilament") & assassins who use "seeker" missiles that circle the skies for days waiting for their targets to show (now you know why the movie opens with a bang!). The whole travel-by-body -exchanging angle is original & very clever in the way it plays out. For once we get a genre movie that's got a brain & plenty of action, too. A real surprise coming from director Allan Moyle, whose previous films, including the delicious PUMP UP THE VOLUME, seem more focused on teens, music, & sex (though there's plenty of that here)
XCHANGE: The Blurring of Fiction with Reality (Rating: 4.00)
Review : The world of XCHANGE is one that is only a few years distance from our own time. The basic architecture is the same, but what gives the social background its distinctive future flavor is the uibiquitousness of future gizmos. The film begins with a miniature victim seeking missile that strikes from out of the blue. Though the surface of the film deals with a future society in which one may transfer his mind to the body of another, the subtext discusses what is often lacking in science fiction films with premises like this: the moral/ethical underpinning. The hero (and this is where it gets confusing) transfers his mind to the body of another (Kyle MacLachlan), who in turn tranfers it to yet a third host (Adam Baldwin). Although most of the plot is a ticking clock that requires a solution before Zero Hour, the true focus is on how both MacLachlan and Baldwin confront the ethics of mind swapping. What are the boundaries that one must observe with a host body? Should one avoid dangerous activities and/or hedonistic encounters. Director Alan Moyles suggests that most of those who mind swap (called floaters) do so mostly to engage in outrageous sexual antics. The ticking time plot requires that the hero focus his attention on regaining the use of his illegally floated body. XCHANGE is a surprisingly in-depth story that requires both floater and viewer to think about the consequences of passionate encounters with other floaters. The consequences of a failure to follow suggested ethics are not often seen in a movie, or, for that matter, in life either.
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