Mark Wahlberg has Infinite lives in a blockbuster without enough soul
Marky Mark's reincarnation action movie has more exposition than story
Film Reviews Mark Wahlberg
One of the challenges of launching a new science fiction or fantasy universe is explaining all the damn rules that govern it. Infinite, a brisk but largely flavorless blast of comic-bookish origin story boilerplate, wastes no time getting down to that obligatory business. The film lays out its premise over an opening aerial tour of Mexico City, in oddly formal and probably studio mandated voice-over. Never mind that all of this information, plucked from the pages of D. Eric Maikranz’s novel The Reincarnationist Papers, will be reiterated via dialogue later in the movie. Infinite takes no chances on losing anyone—sound logic, perhaps, for a would-be blockbuster with more exposition than story.
The narration comes courtesy of Heinrich Treadway (Dylan O’Brien), who speeds through the car-chase prologue on a mission. The next time we see him, he’s someone else entirely: a Bostony loner lug played by Mark Wahlberg. Heinrich, you see, is now Evan McCauley, who’s shocked to discover that the visions running through his head aren’t symptoms of schizophrenia, as his doctors have long believed, but memories from past lives. Evan is an Infinite, one of a race of eternally reincarnated people who dress like fashion models, congregate in high-tech temple headquarters, and take sides in an endless civil war between different factions of their kind. The good guys, dubbed The Believers, use their centuries of knowledge and experience to aid mankind. The bad guys, helpfully referred to as The Nihilists, want to exterminate the whole species, mostly to end their own constantly rebooting existence.
Wahlberg, who couldn’t convince as a high-school science teacher, would seem an unusual choice to play a man with the wisdom of countless lifetimes. But he’s a fine fit for an undying dude “locked out” of his very long memory bank; the film mostly asks Evan to look vaguely befuddled at his circumstances—a Wahlberg specialty. Scholars in the field of Marky Mark studies might note how neatly Infinite fits into the career of a movie star increasingly obsessed with inserting himself into recent history’s direst dilemmas. What is immortality but a chance to play hero across the ages? In truth, Wahlberg brings what he usually does to prospective franchise fare: wooden tough-guy posturing and the requisite gym time—the same skillset he flexed for director Antoine Fuqua during their last disposable collaboration, Shooter.
The setup isn’t far from last year’s superhero sleeper The Old Guard, except that the heroes here have to switch bodies and re-endure teething every time they go down. That movie was no masterpiece, but it did seem concerned with the logistics and psychological ramifications of its eons-spanning high concept. For all its data dumps, Infinite answers fewer questions than it raises. Is everyone reincarnated, and only the Infinites can remember their past lives? Do they remember everything, or just the most pertinent bits of backstory? The film’s villain, played by a bald and magnificently bearded Chiwetel Ejiofor, has the master plan of a Marvel heavy. (Literally—he’s after an egg-shaped MacGuffin called, uh, The Egg, that he’ll use to… blow everyone into a cloud of ash.) But the big bad’s also the one person on screen who seems to genuinely wrestle with the burden of eternal life (he has the added existential curse of regaining full knowledge and sentience the minute he blips into a new womb), and Ejiofor gives his thirst for the void at least a small spark of melancholy. Perhaps the actor is channeling his own desire to be someplace, anyplace else.
When it isn’t explaining and explaining and explaining some more, Infinite is steering into rudimentary action sequences, proficiently and legibly staged by Fuqua, against a sonic backdrop of generically chunky rock guitar. A little Mission: Impossible here, a little Fast & Furious there, a sword fight on a tumbling aircraft, a car chase through a police station (which sounds cooler than it plays). At least there’s a decent explanation this time for the foolhardy/fearless way people always behave in action movies. Why not jump out of that plane or take that tight turn or race into a spray of bullets if the worst consequence awaiting you is yet another go through puberty?
What Infinite fatally lacks is personality. It’s all sci-fi table setting all the time, racing through introductions and plot points at a mercenary pace, its wheel manned by a star whose default mode for this kind of movie is hunky frowning. Just when you start to wonder if living forever robs you of a sense of humor, in waltzes reliable comic wringer Jason Mantzoukas to hijack the movie for a few scenes with his usual I-can’t-believe-I-landed-this-gig cheekiness (plus some blatant ADR zingers). He seems to have walked in from a whole other film—a more playful and less businesslike one, likely a better one. Still, his presence makes a certain thematic sense: Here’s another actor, like Mark Wahlberg, who can’t help but just be himself on screen, like a soul passing from one character to the next, each new performance a kind of reincarnation.
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Honestly, this form of immortality doesn’t seem that bad. Reincarnating, having access to your former memories while at the same time able to become different people, living different lives, having different perspectives, rather than just being locked in the same body and the same mindset for all eternity. Seems alright.
I know that certain sins are supposed to get you reincarnated as a “hungry ghost”. But if the wheel of life is supposed to go forever, how does a ghost die and get reincarnated?
It’s a bit too convoluted to go into too much detail here, but it requires twelve guys, an industrial mining drill, and a leprechaun.
Sounds like a Pacman prequel.
PacMan .
The last century or so might not have been that bad but if these theoretical immortals are born at random and not the children of the elite, through most of history a good many of them died before age 5 from common diseases. Those who survived were likely serfs/peasants/slaves (name varies by culture) and lived a life famously described by Gibbon as “nasty, brutish and short.”At least in one body you’d have a chance to build something, impersonate your own heir, that sort of thing. Being reborn means starting over every few decades in circumstances completely out of your control. At best you’ve got years until you can escape and find a setup you left for yourself in a previous life. If all that happens to be on the same continent as you.
The book “ the first 15 lives of Harry August” does a good job of explaining how the reincarnated take care of money ( not having to be educated again) from life to life with a secret society keeping thing going.It covers people who reincarnate back to the start of their lifes again , but its a similar setup.
Someone pointed out that if you’re immortal, there’s a pretty good chance that somewhere along the centuries, you could get trapped somewhere.Maybe caught under a landslide or lost at sea, either trapped in a ship at the bottom of the ocean, or circling an ocean gyre for centuries.Just think being buried alive for eternity, whether by accident or foul play. It’d be hell.At least reincarnation spares you from that.Just when you start to wonder if living forever robs you of a sense of humorI think you would lose your sense of humor after seeing everything over and over thousands of time, and normal people would have to seem impossibly dull at some point.
Assassin’s Creed lore is about this; how we fail to truly learn from history because we fundamentally lack the experience of prior generations.
I think it depends. If the weight of experience of living so long would reset with each new life. that could work otherwise you’d get extremely tired of life sooner or later when increasingly everything lost its appeal. Highlander covered this quite well with a grim faced Connor Macleod in his seat among the rest of an audience standing and applauding something.The book The Dosadi Experiment had an interesting spin on tbe concept where you could tap into, access or even reactivate past lives when needed but in theory put them back in storage afterwards.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dosadi_Experiment
One of my little fiction pet peeves is that I actually think immortality sounds pretty awesome, provided you get the kind of immortality where you can live forever at a reasonable age and not some kind of deliberately dickish, literal genie “You’re immortal, but you never stop aging” nonsense. I’m sick of tired of fiction’s insidious pro-death propaganda, dammit.
One of my little fiction pet peeves is that I actually think immortality sounds pretty awesome, provided you get the kind of immortality where you can live forever at a reasonable age It probably would be . . . for the first few centuries.
I mean, there are all the logistical issues, how does your immortality handle pain, drowning, beheading, things of that nature. If you lose an arm, does it grow back, or are you just a one-armed immortal, now?
There’s also the issue with human memory. Our memories tend to work as a fraction of our whole life, which is why time seems to speed up as we get older. When you’re six, summer vacation seems to last forever because those three months are a much higher proportion of your entire life so far than they are when you’re 40. So, once you’re a few hundred years old, it will feel like whole decades just flip past you.
I could certainly imagine once you hit the thousand year mark you’d just be bored. You’ve done everything you care to do, seen everything you care to see, and any new shit showing up is just an irritant and some other crap to learn, and by the time you get the hang of it some other thing has replaced it, so keeping up with anything would just be kind of a chore. Friendships, falling in love, all of that stuff would feel as fleeting as a conversation at a bus stop because of the aforementioned issues with memory. “Hey, maybe I should look up that woman I was into? Oh, that was 80 years ago, she’s dead.” The extreme age difference would also create insurmountable cultural differences. Sure, you look like you’re 32, but you’re actually 1008. How do you even have a conversation with someone 980 years younger than you are?
Not to mention, the concept of forever is fucking scary. People start talking about the next ice age or the sun going nova in a billion years and eating the Earth and you get to think, “yup, I’m gonna be around for that. Wonder what living through that is gonna be like.”
Tolkien had Legolas address that perception of time for immortal beings in LotR:For the Elves the world moves, and it moves both very swift and very slow. Swift, because they themselves change very little, and all else fleets by: it is a grief to them. Slow, because they do not count the running years, not for themselves. The passing seasons are but ripples ever repeated in the long long stream.
You know what, let’s settle this; peacocks don’t fly.
They fly a little.
About as much as a penguin.
Ffy
The biggest question is this movie and biggest plot hole is that if Bathurst is searching for oblivion, why doesn’t he just shoot himself with his dethroned. Get his minions to seal the resulting sim chip in concrete and then a titanium box and throw in the Marianas trench. Seems like a no brainer
So all male former past lives or not? Potentially interesting avenues if not, hopefully not in a car crash sort of way, though.
I was reading the Wikipedia page for the film which led to the one for the book it was based on. Apparently it was self-published to start with and the author wrote in the book that if any reader could get it to a studio and made into a film, they’d get 10%.Apparently, a person worked for a studio found a copy of the book in a hotel in Nepal while backpacking and did in fact ultimately that did lead to the film being made.You’ll be glad to know he got his 10%.Also, Chris Evans was in talks to star at one point but had to drop out because of a schedule clash with Defending Jacob.
Im currently reading the book it came from and so far the only thing that they kept from the novel is the protagonists name , and reincarnation.
…and on finishing it , yeah , book is almost totally different.
Marky Mark’s reincarnation action movie has more exposition than storyI…is it HIM delivering said exposition? Because, if so…fuck, THAT’S a choice.
Meh. Marky Mark is so fucking bland in everything.
Agreed, but I REALLY want to see him wax philosophical about death.“Ya think it’s the end, but it ain’t. It’s the beginning. And when ya pierce that fackin’ veil ya get a look at alla conshusness.”
“Say ‘hi’ to your grandma for me, OK?”
In spite of myself/mostly his history, I actually have liked him in some stuff but off the top of my head I can only come up with I Heart Huckabees. He’s still playing a bit of a lunkhead, but one who’s dabbling in philosophy and really struggling with coming to terms with it. I think he can be funny— and often intentionally— but I prefer it when it seems earnest. I still haven’t seen the Ted movies beyond some trailers since a lot of that McFarlane humor skews more cynical, but he actually seems to have decent chemistry with the CG bear?
I Heart Huckabees is my go-to pro-Wahlberg movie as well. “Struggling lunkhead” nails what is good and why. Wahlberg is at his best when he can be dopey, Ted is another good example and The Departed, probably the one movie where everyone likes him, weaponizes his meathead Boston attitude instead of denying it. But the struggling is the big thing, I think Wahlberg is constantly trying to make himself look good (right down to stopping 9/11) and that attitude and his performance of it is boring as shit. But he’s got real vulnerability when he wants to use it.
I thought he was amazing in Boogie Nights. Then I saw him in The Corrupter and thought, “Ohhh. I get it. The character in Boogie Nights is the only character he can play.”That said, I think he’s great in Three Kings and The Departed as well as I Heart Huckabees along with a smattering of films he was good in. So, he’s found his way over the years.
Oh doy, of course he’s good in Boogie Nights. But that’s another one where he’s naive and foolish instead of ultra-tough military-adjacent hero.
There’s basically Boogie Nights, The Other Guys, and Pain & Gain.
He is the PRIME example of actors who depend 100% on their director. He’s performances have ranged from OK/Good Enough to God Awful.
Three Kings?! 🙂
“The Other Guys”?
agreed, he’s at the top of my “how does this person have a career?” list.
WHAT’S UP JERKS
Is this a Jacob’s Ladder situation?
Well, Chris Evans had to leave the main role because it clashed with Defending Jacob so in answer to your question, no.
Hey-OOOOHHH!!!
The film lays out its premise over an opening aerial tour of Mexico
City, in oddly formal and probably studio mandated voice-over.
This was the same thing that bugged me about “Boss Level.” You could tell from the level of voice-over the studio had no confidence in this thing (or the lead as an actor).So they chopped it all to hell with a ton of obnoxious over-explanatory voice over and made it really hard to just get absorbed in what was going on.
Damnit, we’re never gonna get an actual adaptation of Replay, because crappy knock-offs of it have salted the earth. 🙁
Ah but Replay is that slightly different genre of ‘Reincarnation, but you come back as yourself in the same era over and over’ . See also ‘the first fifteen lives of Harry August’.
need that zukes supercut
“What is immorality but a chance to play hero across the ages?”Huh. For me, it’s having sex with animals while children watch.
That’s right officer. This comment right here.
I swear she looked at least 70…in dog years.
This just reminded me of the all-time “How about in dog years?” comment here and now I can’t stop laughing, so thank you for that.
Honestly, the image of Chiwetel Ejiofor being waterboarded with gasoline through a silk handkerchief in order to achieve the unexplained secondary goal of “seeing the face of God” is the only thing in this entire film that I will remember in a year. Or, well, that and the fact that Chiwetel Ejiofor spends the film trying to reacquire a death-egg in order to disintegrate all living creatures in order to stop his reincarnating when he could’ve just shot himself with his “trap your consciousness in an SD card to prevent reincarnation” gun… at literally any time. Yeah, this movie was stupid. Probably would’ve worked better as a tv show. Also, Dylan O’ Brian and Marky Mark should’ve swapped roles. I almost wonder whether that was the original plan. Marky Mark is getting a little old to play characters this unworldly.
My wife kept asking why he didn’t just shoot himself with his own gun. My only answer is maybe he isn’t 100% sure what happens when someone gets shot with it? But clearly it’s been around 30+ years, surely he could have tested it on someone and then broken it to bring them back.Honestly i expected an end credits scene of a very pissed off cyborg Ejiofor and was robbed of the moment
I recently confessed to my girlfriend my guilty pleasure of Mark Wahlberg movies. I haven’t seen all of them by any stretch but there’s something…I don’t know. Where everyone walks like they’re leaning into a high wind, a-la Four Brothers.I don’t get it.I guess I’ll see it.May God have mercy on my soul(s).
The bad guys are called The Nihilists, the macguffin is The Egg – this sounds like it’s from the Unobtanium school of genre writing.
Seems like a neat concept with a lot of potential philosophical depth wasted in a typically bland Fuqua action movie.
I’m sorry but if a group is called the Nihilists , they better have at least one member of the Red Hot Chili Peppers , and acclaimed singer songwriter Aimee Mann.
You want a dull Marky Mark role? I can get you a dull Marky Mark role, believe me. There are ways, Dude. You don’t wanna know about it. Believe me.Hell, I can get you a dull Marky Mark role by 3:00 this afternoon — with nail polish.