Vice has Bruce Willis as a meglomaniacal business owner who has created this resort where people can act out their worst fantasies on human-like robot people. Want to rape and kill a hot blond? Sure, we all do! What can go wrong with that? Plenty, as one of the hot blonds, Amber Childres, starts to gain some level of self-awareness, and she escapes. That leads to the involvement of police detective Thomas Jane, who has wanted to bring down Willis's resort for a long time--why would he want to do that?--and he and the escaped robot woman work together toward that end. Fortunately for both of them, Willis's contract stipulated that he couldn't shoot in multiple locations, so they know where to find him when they want to take him down.
This felt like a Philip K. Dickensian concept that may have wanted a bigger budget theatrical release, but ended up here in DTV. For me I think the reason why is the overall concept is pretty macabre. The idea of a resort-like location where people can act out their fantasies is one thing, but when the fantasies are violent and sadistic that's something else. "Vice" isn't an apt title, but I guess "Psycho" was already taken. From there, there are some good cat and mouse elements, and I liked Jane and Childers's performances, but we could see those elements in anything. The hook is supposed to be this PKD-ensian idea of the resort, but when it's so disturbed it's hard to get into it. "Imagine a place where you can rape and kill a woman with no repercussions!" No, I'd rather not.
This was made in 2015, and around that time Willis was becoming increasingly known for these DTV flicks where he's either not in them much, does all of his scenes in one location, doesn't do his reverse shots, and there's a sense that he's mailing it in and just collecting a paycheck. What do we do with that? The movie is casting him because his face on the tin makes it worth more to the studios and distributors, and that gets more streams and rentals--and more folks like me reviewing it for our sites, which gets it more run as well. I'll be the 39th outside review on IMDb, which gives you a sense of the ecosystem we're all working in here with these. This isn't Klaus Kinski or Ernest Borgnine working for a paycheck in a low-budget flick, but they still turn in a great performance; this is Willis trying to get in and out with the least work possible, and there's almost a sense of disdain for the material as he does it. Again, what do we make of that? Is it more fun as a novelty, or less fun because it's so cynical? The movie should have been the resort allows you to pretend to be an actor in your favorite movies, and Willis plays a robot version of himself who can't be bothered to do the scenes with a housewife, and he needs to be reprogrammed. That would have been more interesting than sick rape and murder fantasies.
On the other hand, Thomas Jane really brings it, and I wonder if on his side he's looking at it as "if I show up here, maybe I'll get bigger parts down the line." Or maybe he didn't have the disdain for the film overall that Willis did. It's not like he's hurting for work either, but unlike Willis who has had a bigger career to fall back on, I think Jane was expecting The Punisher to lead to the kind of franchise blockbusters that Toby McGuire got with Spider-man and Hugh Jackman got with Wolverine, and instead he ended up with Ben Affleck in Daredevil. For me, this performance shows us how much that Jane Punisher didn't work through no fault of his. Had it been more close to the comic book canon, and Jane had been allowed to be more Frank Castle, maybe we get two or three films out of it. It would be nice to revisit.
As I mentioned above, I thought Childers did well in this too, considering she was playing a part that I don't know there was any precedent for. Yes, robot having an existential crisis happens all the time, but coupled with remembering horrific events like being raped and murdered hundreds of times? And to some extent she as an actor is having to do the same thing in this role: she's playing the standard DTV younger pretty woman, usually clad in black leather or something similar, there to appease the planned male demographic this was intended for, and in her performance she has to say "I'm more than that, you can't just swap me out for another actress and give her the same outfit and call it good," though we as the viewer have often seen a lot of these, and we have seen her part played by myriad other actresses before. That's not what matters though, who cares if we've seen the same thing hundreds of times, if she can stand out, not to us but to people looking to cast her in other things, then she isn't just any woman playing this part, and that does make her performance give the film a little more depth than these movies usually have.
I think I already teased one idea for how I would have wanted the resort to be instead of a place where people can go and act out their most sadistic fantasies, the idea of being able to act out scenes with famous actors. I was trying to think what I would've wanted though for a place like that. First off, I'm married, and I think anything sexual, even if it's with a robot woman, would be cheating--and again, the idea of using a robot person for that kind of thing is off-putting. What if you had robot versions of dead musicians? Like I never got to see Eddie Money before he passed. Or my wife and I could see the Temptations with David Ruffin and Eddie Kendricks. Or Teddy Pendergrass. Imagine that, a movie where a robot who thinks he's Teddy Pendergrass discovers he's a robot, and that's the existential crisis. You could call it "Close the Door".
And with that, I think it's time to wrap this up. This is no longer on Tubi, but you can stream it with Showtime. If you don't already have Showtime, it's not worth spending money on, so I would wait for it to show up on Tubi again--and even then, I don't know how much you need to bump it up in your queue on there. We've seen this before, and the elements that try to make it different, make it a little too much for me.
For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3480796
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