This is probably for the best, since we can’t imagine Farrell throwing out one liners like, “Consider dat a divorce” “Screw you” or “See you at der party, Richter” with Arnold’s distinctive panache.įuture “Are you actually happy with how your life’s turned out?” Johnny Cho’s Rekall rep is much more smooth and soft-sell than the outgoing one, and the movie as a whole appears to have a much more brooding, Bourne-esque identity thriller edge. We live in a post Nolan-Batman world these days, of course, so it’s inevitable that such humour didn’t make the cut. The bit where Quaid is ‘sold’ his Rekall memory implant by a chap with the patter of a used car salesman is just priceless. In his Hollywood movies, the Dutch director appeared to be fascinated by American adverts and untrustworthy salesmen flogging dodgy products it was something that ran like a black thread through RoboCop, and it’s woven into the fabric of Total Recall, too. Verhoeven brought a certain amount of absurd, playful exuberance to Total Recall, from its creatively horrible violence to its talking robot taxi drivers. Humour “Yank that needle out before it takes!” Recasting Lori as Quaid’s merciless hunter should give the action a bit more dramatic heft, and from the snippets we’ve seen so far, Beckinsale appears to relish the job of playing a villain. This is quite a shrewd move, since the notion of a dearly beloved suddenly turning against a protagonist is a potent one, and was only skipped over in the original. What the 2012 version appears to have done is made Richter and Lori into one character, since the former is nowhere to be seen on its cast list. In the 1990 version of Total Recall, Quaid was chased all over the place by Richter (Michael Ironside), Lori’s true husband (or at least lover). Here, Lori is played by Kate Beckinsale (replacing Sharon Stone), which is appropriate, since her character is given much more action stuff to do in this Total Recall – stuff she’s well versed in after making loads of those Underworld movies. It’s certainly not spoiling things to state that Lori isn’t exactly who she seems, since the trailer makes her treachery plain in any case. To this end, he packed the movie with as much wry humour, insanely over-the-top violence and subtle commentary as he could get away with, and the result is a fantastic product of its time.Īs Quaid’s story begins, Lori is his pretty and devoted wife. Paul Verhoeven, among the most slyly intelligent directors then working in Hollywood, new what he was making: a trashy Arnold Schwarzenegger blockbuster.
Such madness was all part of what made Total Recall so special, of course. This wall, coincidentally, covers a shortcut to the underground alien lair Doug had been looking for in the first place. The movie’s sledgehammer storytelling is summed up best in a late, brief scene in which an evil character shows up in a literal deus ex machina determined to kill hero Doug Quaid with a tunnelling machine, the bad guy does that typical Hollywood bad guy thing of telling the hero what he’s going to do before he does it (“I’m gonna grind you up man!”), before narrowly missing Doug and smashing through a wall. It’s not unfair to say that, compared to the relative subtlety of the Philip K Dick writings that inspired it, 1990’s Total Recall was about as subtle as an escaped rhinoceros running down a crowded high street.