IMPOSTOR

Directed by Gary Fleder

Starring Gary Sinise, Madeleine Stowe,

Vincent D’Onofrio and Mekhi Pfeiffer

Impostor, the new nightscape sci-fi action-thriller, has one of those come-and-get-me titles that practically begs a movie critic to spin some self-descriptive pun from it. It takes great willpower to avoid giving in, and I sadly don’t have that kind of willpower. So I’ll just say it: Impostor is an…impostor, a fake amalgam of other, more beloved science fiction tropes.

The history of Impostor is actually more interesting than the final product. Adapted from a 1953 short story by the legendary Phillip K. Dick (whose work also inspired Blade Runner and Total Recall), the movie was first conceived as one third of an aborted anthology titled Alien Love Triangle. Executives at Miramax (and their genre-oriented daughter, Dimension Films) liked the footage director Gary Fleder (Don’t Say A Word) shot so much, that they asked him to expand it into a full-length feature. Then several release dates came and went, and the movie wound up on the dusty slagheap of forgotten projects. Dimension finally released it, and watching the movie I became confused as to why the execs thought it was a good idea to turn Fleder’s short into a 90-minute movie. Nothing in it convinced me that it was good, even at only 40 minutes.

Fleder and Co. obviously didn’t intend it, but Impostor is also eerily prescient of current events. In 2079, Earth is deeply involved in a war with unseen aliens from Alpha Centauri, with much of the planet in shambles (major cities are protected with large, electromagnetic domes). Images of charred rubble at the beginning and scenes set in a desolate, ruined landscapes would’ve once brought up memories of post-apocalyptic thrillers of yore, but now bring up dread thoughts of Sept. 11. Orwellian slogans (“Victory at any cost”) and a military state where personal freedoms are sacrificed for the greater good are also strangely similar to events that are happening now. I say all this because it may make some people uneasy.

Its use as a precognitive tool aside, Impostor is nothing more than an odorous B-movie dud. Gary Sinise plays Dr. Spencer Olham, an Oppenheimer-like scientist who’s developed a weapon of mass destruction that can help aid the humans in the war. Olham is accused by CIA goon Hathaway (a stiff Vincent D’Onofrio) of being an alien assassin, a biological cyborg who’s meant to think he’s Olham and has a bomb in his chest that will coalesce and trigger upon meeting its target (funny, the individual parts of Impostor never coalesce but still it forms a bomb). Olham escapes vivisection, flees the city and hides in the outer zone, where he befriends a young “zoner” named Cale (Mekhi Pfeiffer, who put his molten glower to better use in last summer’s O). Olham agrees to help Cale get much needed medication for the young man’s community if Cale helps Olham back into the city to retrieve evidence of his humanity.

Impostor, with its neon-glow lighting, is generic in every possible way. Fleder’s half-baked direction has created a direct-to-video-film that has somehow sneaked into theaters. Fleder has proved his credentials as a hack before, and here he can’t even stage a coherent fight scene. His muddled direction and the choppy, headache-inducing editing of Arman Minasian and Bob Ducsay, make it impossible to figure out who is doing what to whom. The cinematography by Robert Elswit, all tilted angles and monochromatic blue lighting, makes things even murkier. The ludicrous screenplay is riddled with plot holes and doesn’t effectively establish who Olham is (other than a loving husband and a brilliant scientist, both of which are stated rather than shown). With the exception of AI: Artificial Intelligence and The Matrix, there hasn’t been a good sci-fi film for a couple of years (Mission To Mars, Red Planet, Final Fantasy, Wing Commander, The One, Planet of the Apes, Battlefield Earth — I rest my case.)

Fleder abandons his talented crew of actors. Tony Shalhoub, whose fourth-billed role is really a cameo, is smart enough to drop out quickly. Madeleine Stowe is forgotten as Olham’s wife. Sinise is forced to carry the lead weight of this on his shoulders — I doubt this will remain on anyone’s resume. The first new film of 2002 and there only one way to describe Impostor: it stinks.