Infinite Review: 4 Ups & 6 Downs
Mark Wahlberg's latest streaming actioner is an absurd mess.
We live in an age where the trailer for a movie may now drop mere weeks before the film itself is released on streaming platforms, as was surprisingly the case with Mark Wahlberg's new sci-fi action joint Infinite.
The Antoine Fuqua-directed blockbuster had its theatrical release cancelled as a result of the pandemic, though having sat through the end product, it's hard not to see the global situation as an easy excuse to avoid putting out a costly, embarrassing box office bomb when the film can instead bolster Paramount's fledgling streaming service Paramount+.
Is Infinite a terrible film? Absolutely not, though it's certainly nowhere close to good, either.
A mostly brainless blend of some of your favourite sci-fi flicks with a steroidal dose of over-the-top action and a bevy of talented-yet-underused actors, this is exactly what you should expect from an A-lister genre film given only a most minimal marketing push pre-release.
It's not going to get the masses frantically signing up for Paramount+, admittedly, but you could do far worse than this inoffensively silly, knowingly dumb slice of action nonsense...
Downs...
6. It's A Mash-Up Of Other, Better Sci-Fi Stories
Though Infinite's central hook is actually pretty interesting - that a secret group of people exist, Infinites, who are reborn into a new life every time they die - the overall execution feels painfully, at times hilariously familiar.
You love The Matrix, right? You thought the Assassin's Creed games were cool? You watch everything the MCU puts out?
Infinite wants to be all things to all the people who enjoyed these properties, but at the same time makes little effort to fashion many of its own unique ideas.
It is a shameless grab-bag of concepts and aesthetics from the last quarter-century of sci-fi media, mashed together and poured out for at-home audiences to swallow down.
There are worse things for a film to be than unoriginal, for sure, but with such a potential-rich setup, it's a shame that the path taken here is such a lazy, formulaic one.