Blade Runner 2049: 10 Reasons It's Massively Overrated

Consider Rick Deckard of the original - and still the best, thank you very much - Blade Runner movie. Harrison Ford played him asa guy who had been beaten down by life who also happened to be sardonic and - at times - funny.

Embodied by Ford, the character felt three-dimensional in all the ways that Officer K - Ryan Gosling's protagonist in Blade Runner 2049 - doesn't. Gosling, as an actor, has two modes: he's either stoic and charming or stoic and stoic, and in this sequel we get the latter. Officer K is essentially an extension of the character we saw in Drive, the movie that relaunched Gosling's career and made him Hollywood's coolest actor.

K is supposed to be a sad and confused, of course - he's a replicant whose job is to hunt down replicants: fine. But Gosling delivers a flat and quiet performance that is no different to countless other flat and quiet performances he's given in a bunch of other movies, from The Place Beyond the Pines to God Only Forgives.

Thing is, it was never a rule of Blade Runner's world that replicants had to be lifeless human beings. In the original film, save for Rachel, the replicant characters were the picture's more larger than life characters, all with huge personalities. "More human than human," as the saying goes. Did we really need a forgettable, broody Gosling at the centre of this movie, mumbling his lines and acting as if he were a robot?