10 Philip K Dick Movie Adaptations Ranked Best To Worst

Total Recall 2012 arrives with three strikes against it: it’s rated PG-13, the script is co-written by Ultraviolet’s Kurt Wimmer and it has no use for the original’s awesomely silly tag line, “They stole his mind – now he wants it back!”

Colin Farrell stands in for Arnie, and the filmmakers have tried to make the character a more credible Everyman than the Austrian Oak, but unfortunately that’s led to them eliminating all the zingers, all the cartoonish mayhem and all the fun. Farrell still gets to perform superhuman stunts, but there’s so much digital trickery involved that it’s all rather unexciting.

So much plot has been removed, and replaced by blah chase sequences, that all the wit, invention and life gets sucked out of the story. Jessica Biel suddenly appears, and there’s a chase. Bill Nighy suddenly appears, and there’s a chase. Bryan Cranston (criminally underused in the Ronny Cox role) appears, and blah blah blah. We’ve seen this approach to “reimagining” a popular classic before but Michael Bay’s The Hitcher was a soulless abomination whose name shall not be spoken above a whisper for the love of God.