5 Dumb Things We Saw Happen In The Worst Summer Film Season Ever

5. The Finale On The Fall In Total Recall

This summer's remake of the cheesy Arnold Schwarzenegger film Total Recall was already in trouble from the beginning of production, as Mars and the messianic aspects of the original and the short story were completely excised. In their place was an idea about class warfare, visually and metaphorically represented by a giant elevator called The Fall that went through the core of Earth and connected the rich (who lived in Britain - HAHAHA) and the working class of the Colony in Australia. I suppose we can overlook the sheer idiocy of such a device sliding through the molten core of the Earth at 9,800°F or surviving the intense pressures found there. The Fall is merely a silly plot device concocted for the film's finale, which uses "gravity shifting" (when The Fall gets near the other side of the planet, the gravity shifts in the other direction ... ugh, nevermind) to allow our protagonists to escape the fully armed guards pursuing them. But my question is this: is the former wife of Douglas Quaid (Colin Farrell), the sexy Lori (Kate Beckinsale), some sort of robot or superhuman? Throughout the film she leaps across great chasms and crashes down through multiple levels of glass windows without a scratch. At the end, we clearly see her trapped on The Fall just before Quaid detonates explosives and destroys Cohaagen's entire army as The Fall literally falls into the Earth's core. Yet Lori somehow survives again, straps on an electronic mask, programs it to look like Quaid's new girlfriend Melina (Jessica Biel), and tries to kill Quaid again. Could this final bit of idiocy be part of the ReKal experience? Is Quaid just imagining this as part of a video game-like simulation? If so, the film gives no indication that it was, as Quaid comes out to a world with The Fall in flames and Cohaagen's troops dead. The original Paul Verhoeven film continuously flirted with the idea that Quaid's experiences on Mars and his messianic destiny might be programmed; this clumsy film does nothing of the sort. In fact, the whole "is it an implanted memory?" angle is jettisoned thirty minutes in. So I guess Lori is just superhuman. Or the screenwriters are morons.