No one understood me in 2019 and certainly no one understands now (because, well, basically no one saw the movie), but it bears repeating: Will Smith’s run-and-gun two-hander Gemini Man is good, actually. The Tubi audience seems to agree: As of this week, Smith’s action vehicle is blowing up on the free-to-watch streaming service where overlooked box-office bombs are regularly reborn like cable classics. I’m happy to see it, but saddened that no one will really see Gemini Man the way it was meant to be seen.
Seven years ago, I had a blast with Ang Lee’s audacious Bourne-style thriller, which pitted Smith against a de-aged double of himself. What struck me wasn’t just that it had been kicking around Hollywood since the late ’90s — it was that, in Ang Lee’s hands, we had a movie that felt beamed in from the future. The premise of Gemini Man is simple: Will Smith plays an aging assassin hunted by a younger clone of himself, fully rendered by Wētā Digital. But even at the time, it was clear the movie wasn’t really about the chase. It was about whether digital humans and next-gen presentation formats could carry a blockbuster.
Lee shot the film in high-frame-rate 3D, pushing it all the way to 120 frames per second, and that decision hovered over every second of the experience. If you thought Peter Jackson’s 60 FPS take on The Hobbit looked whack, or aren’t even sure James Cameron cracked the code in his recent Avatar movies, your brain would have melted witnessing Lee’s vision on the big screen with the proper projection setup (which almost no theater was equipped for).
Thanks to press credentials and a now-unaffordable New York City residence, I managed to catch Gemini Man as Lee imagined it. The experience was a gauntlet thrown down on everything we, mere mortals, understood about action filmmaking. The added frames created a hyper-clarity that made everything — faces, motion, sets — feel uncomfortably real. Fight scenes lost blur, so every punch landed with strange precision. Foot chases at the theatrical allure of a Disney World stunt show rather than feeling high-octane. Even the digital double of Smith, impressive as it was, became part of the experiment: without the buffer of traditional film softness, the illusion had nowhere to hide.
I have no doubt it’s exactly what Lee wanted, even if the approach risked distracting viewers from the actual plot. And you know what the difference is between Wētā and most visual-effects shops eking out de-aging effects? It makes it look goooood.
I can’t defend the ultimate story of Gemini Man like it’s Shakespearean drama, the same way I wouldn’t say James Cameron reinvented the wheel with Avatar. Reinventing the tropes isn’t Lee’s goal as much as building on them to show his audiences something new. So while there’s some interesting tension between Smith’s assassin and his clone, the young double and his surrogate father (a black-ops a-hole played by Clive Owen), and the not-quite-a-romance between Smith and Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s monitoring agent Danny, it’s all really in service of getting us to the next set piece. Thankfully, Lee and his stunt team know how to pop off a fiery explosive and choreograph a fight that wrings double the physicality out of a star.
Smith’s career took wild turns after the release of Gemini Man. After the movie bombed spectacularly at the box office — $166 million worldwide against a reported $140 million budget — Smith went off and reignited the Bad Boys franchise, won an Oscar for his work in King Richard, slapped Chris Rock at the same ceremony and sent his career in a tailspin, then pivoted to being a YouTube creator. Though he’s been mounting a comeback, nothing in development has gone before cameras.
Gemini Man was seen as a nail in the coffin for Smith’s action career and, now, at 57 years old, it may forever look that way. But even if you’ll never see Gemini Man the correct way — in glorious 120 fps — the Tubi collective is right to run to see it. Lee’s technological leaps still beam out of the movie, just like the fidelity of a film shot on IMAX cameras looks clearer than anything suffocated by Netflix’s blurry video standards. The director’s work is on the screen, and with Gemini Man now free to stream, there’s no excuse to look away this time.
