Quartile rating: 6/10 · 1 rating
An extremely wealthy elderly man dying from cancer undergoes a radical medical procedure that transfers his consciousness to the body of a healthy young man but everything may not be as good as it seems when he starts to uncover the mystery of the body's origins and the secret organization that will kill to keep its secrets.
Self/less takes a potentially rich transhumanist premise but executes it in a disappointingly generic fashion. The body-swap/consciousness transfer concept had strong sci-fi potential, but the film quickly devolves into a fairly standard action-thriller once the mystery is revealed, abandoning its philosophical questions in favor of chase sequences. Ben Kingsley is wasted in limited screen time before handing off to Ryan Reynolds, whose performance is serviceable but unremarkable. The cinematography is polished and competent but nothing distinctive. The novelty suffers because similar body-transfer premises have been explored more thoughtfully elsewhere, and this film takes the most conventional narrative route available. The ending resolves predictably with little emotional payoff, squandering the moral complexity the setup promised.