Infinite (2021)
Directed by Antoine Fuqua
Evan McCauley has skills he never learned and memories of places he has never visited. Self-medicated and on the brink of a mental breakdown, a secret group that call themselves “Infinites” come to his rescue, revealing that his memories are real.
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22 films that influenced Infinite
What critics say influenced Infinite
Sure, it plays with better ideas yanked from various sci-fi movies, books, and TV series, including The Matrix , Altered Carbon , The Fifth Element , and Total Recall .
I’m not in any way suggesting that screenplay writer Ian Shorr ( Office Uprising ) and screen story writer Todd Stein (2:22) absconded with someone else’s ideas, it’s that you can see the influences from stories like W anted (2008), The Matrix (1999), Total Recall (1990), and the John Wick universe in a variety of ways.
The Mark Wahlberg–starrer reveals just how stuck Hollywood sci-fi is in 1999, when The Matrix cemented ideas of digital consciousness in the Western mainstream (with a bent of pan-Asian spirituality).
The bare bones of the plot definitely possess the potential to deliver a strikingly original globetrotting epic, but the final product feels like an undercooked and underwritten slog that echoes superior films like Inception , The Matrix , Netflix’s The Old Guard and even the Fast & Furious franchise, and Infinite doesn’t bring anything to the table that either action or sci-fi fans haven’t seen done before, and much better.
Movies about “the one” — a relative nobody who realizes they’re actually the only person capable of stopping a threat, defeating a villain, or saving the world — had a good run from The Matrix (1999) through numerous YA adventures in the two decades since.
The Matrix is the biggest influence here – the story unfolds in a manner that follows that film almost beat for beat.
The best thing you can say about the film’s optics is at least it only borrows Cloud Atlas’s themes, rather than its yellowface.
The possibilities would seem, well, infinite in an action movie where anyone on the street could secretly be a deathless pawn in an eternal chess match, but the staggering franchise potential of a high-octane “Cloud Atlas” is only hinted at in passing.
A narrative about reincarnation and our meaningful spiritual connections should have dramatic viability ( Cloud Atlas morphed a similar premise into a masterful showcase), but Ian Shorr’s wayward screenplay embraces a hollow shell of studio filmmaking.
Past lives recall Assassin’s Creed .
McCauley, similarly, is beholden to the film’s mechanics and the late-in-the-game introduction of Assassin’s Creed–like concepts, involving digitally diving into past lives to learn new information and skills.
Unsurprisingly, Infinite swipes a bit of everything effective from similar such endeavors released since 1998 — The Matrix here, Wanted there, Assassin’s Creed and The Old Guard everywhere (especially with the presence of Guard co-star Chiwetel Ejiofor here as the heel).
Just when it seems like “Assassin’s Creed” and “The Matrix” are going to be locked in a custody battle for control over where this is all going, Chiwetel Ejiofor shows up in Morpheus cosplay to tip the balance with a silly, unpretentious performance that also screams: “Remember when I was in a marginally better version of this movie last summer?”
The bare bones of the plot definitely possess the potential to deliver a strikingly original globetrotting epic, but the final product feels like an undercooked and underwritten slog that echoes superior films like Inception , The Matrix , Netflix’s The Old Guard and even the Fast & Furious franchise, and Infinite doesn’t bring anything to the table that either action or sci-fi fans haven’t seen done before, and much better.
The high-speed, Fast & Furious -style opening takes place in the Mexican capital in “The Last Life.”
And chase it they do, in a fun highway romp through Mexico City that rivals a Fast & Furious movie, but the film isn’t about any of the people we meet in this opening scene.
Fuqua and Wahlberg have both proven themselves elsewhere, but here their overall disinterest is almost palpable as the former auditions for a Fast & Furious gig while the latter sleepwalks through the entire film.
A little Mission: Impossible here, a little Fast & Furious there, a sword fight on a tumbling aircraft, a car chase through a police station (which sounds cooler than it plays).
Sure, these lucky souls could be writing symphonies or curing cancer, but it’s more exciting to watch Wahlberg ride a motorcycle off a cliff and land on the wing of a low-flying cargo plane — a plausibility-bending stunt not even the “Fast & Furious” franchise would dare.
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For a long time it seems sci-fi action movies have consisted of either massive franchises like Fast and Furious and Mission Impossible , attempts at brainy sci-fi like Tenet , or meat-and-potatoes, old-guy-beats-up-bad-guys movies like Taken .
A little Mission: Impossible here, a little Fast & Furious there, a sword fight on a tumbling aircraft, a car chase through a police station (which sounds cooler than it plays).
But there are also bits and pieces lifted from John Wick , Inception , the Mission: Impossible franchise, and, of course, the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
I’m not in any way suggesting that screenplay writer Ian Shorr ( Office Uprising ) and screen story writer Todd Stein (2:22) absconded with someone else’s ideas, it’s that you can see the influences from stories like W anted (2008), The Matrix (1999), Total Recall (1990), and the John Wick universe in a variety of ways.
Not to mention there’s an attempt to replicate the intricate assassin mythology that deepens the John Wick series, but the convoluted “Infinites” mythology concerning a centuries-long rivalry between people who are good at reincarnation, and the faux philosophy about good and evil that comes with it, is more mind-numbing than enriching.
Infinite feels like what we’d get if Ridley Scott had caved in to every meddling studio note for Blade Runner : all the extra narration, plus all the extra exposition, plus all the extra repetitive dialogue.
Modern western sci-fi lives in the shadow of Asian ideas and aesthetics, from Blade Runner’s Tokyo-inspired cyberpunk to the vaguely Buddhist, Taoist and Hindu philosophies that birthed Star Wars and The Matrix.
Strands of Highlander (1986) rear their head too as we discover that an Infinite can only be “stopped” by a blow to the head in the form of a bullet that… uploads their mind to a digital prison in the cloud?
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Sure, it plays with better ideas yanked from various sci-fi movies, books, and TV series, including The Matrix , Altered Carbon , The Fifth Element , and Total Recall .
If the 2004 marionette action parody “ Team America: World Police ” were remade with actual human beings and not a trace of irony, it could not be more entertainingly stupid than “Infinite,” the new Mark Wahlberg sci-fi thriller.