![]() ![]() ![]() Mae disappears soon after, but she’s not forgotten. The myth of Orpheus and Eurydice is cited more than once as jaded Nick finds himself hypnotized by Mae, a femme fatale who takes a dip in his memory tank ostensibly to recover a lost set of keys. That’s because despite all the plot contortions to uncover the nefarious business of Walter Sylvan - much of it carried out by crooked cop Cyrus Boothe (Cliff Curtis), who’s also in Saint Joe’s pocket - Joy aims to beguile us with romance. During the shootout, a stray bullet hits the jukebox, and, faster than you can say, “Chew baca,” “Tainted Love” comes on. Though not before demonstrating her kick-ass sharpshooter and fight skills, stepping in to save Nick as he’s about to be drowned in a tank full of eels in a New Orleans bar by the henchmen of drug kingpin Saint Joe (Daniel Wu), the area’s chief supplier of a highly addictive opiate called baca. She’s the most intriguing character in the movie, but, unfortunately, disappears for a hefty chunk of it. Nick’s sole employee in his memory biz is Watts (Thandiwe Newton), a loyal ex-comrade from their days of drafted military service who has her own sorrows. Naturally there’s a melancholy mistress on the side, Elsa (Angela Sarafyan), and a young illegitimate son who becomes an inconvenient blight on Walter’s public profile. ![]() The depiction of this decadent dynasty has all the subtlety of an anal probe. He has a wife, Tamara (Marina de Tavira), with a foreign accent and a shaky hold on reality, plus a sniveling scion, Sebastian (Mojean Aria), who learned from Dad not to do his own dirty work. The most powerful of them is Walter Sylvan (Brett Cullen), a Trumpy slumlord with his fingers in all kinds of chicanery and corruption. The border wars have given way to civil conflict as the waters have risen, with the barons claiming all the dry land and pushing the poor and disenfranchised further and further out onto the submerged coastline. This one is in - you guessed it! - a Dystopian Future, in which rage against the wealthy ruling class is a bubbling cauldron. Since business is slow, Nick also takes sideline employment extracting memory depositions for the office of the Miami DA (Natalie Martinez). And I’m the oarsman.” There’s reams of this prosaic stuff: “The past is just a series of moments, each one perfect, complete, a bead on the necklace of time.” “Nothing is more addictive than the past.” “Memories are like perfume, better in small doses.” Narration is also better in small doses, but Joy is so intoxicated by it that she repeats the entire opening spiel in the concluding stretch. “Memory is the boat that sails against its current. “Time is no longer a one-way stream,” says Nick in a gurgle of voiceover that threatens never to end. These are then archived in Nick’s vault on glass discs, because he’s an analog kind of guy. Hugh Jackman plays Nick Bannister, a private investigator who reconnects clients with lost memories through an immersion tank hooked up to computer gadgetry that produces hologram-like visual recordings. Cast: Hugh Jackman, Rebecca Ferguson, Thandiwe Newton, Cliff Curtis, Marina de Tavira, Daniel Wu, Mojean Aria, Brett Cullen, Natalie Martinez, Angela Sarafyan, Nico Parker ![]()
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