"Total Recall" pushes the limits

[rating=5]

Typically, PG-13 films aren’t really allowed to do much in the way of language, violence, and sexual content.  One to two “F-Words,” mild violence, brief nudity, and suggestive sexual content are all permitted.  “Total Recall” had all of these, but just enough to merit the rating.  To be honest, I was surprised that they got away with what they did in this PG-13 film, but it’s not the first to push the MPAA rating boundries.  We all remember the “Paint me like one of your French girls” scene from Titanic, right?  Well as that film and many others like it has shown us, movies that push the bounderies often do well in the box office.  I don’t think this film will be the exception to the rule.  It was fast-paced, well cast, visually pleasing, and just gritty enough for the adults in the audience.

“Total Recall” is a film about a factory worker in the future, Douglas Quaid (Colin Farrell, Fright Night) who pays to have memories installed in order to fill a void he feels in his life.  After things go awry and the company is infiltrated by security officers, he finds himself reacting with speed, precision, and lethal force of a trained spy.  He soon comes to realize that the life he’s been living is not his own, and everything he thought he knew was a false reality meant to keep him from finding out his true identity, an agent of the resistence against the government.  Now with his “wife,” Lori (Kate Beckinsale, Underworld) hunting him down, he must choose to join his comrade, Melina (Jessica Biel, The A-Team) and the resistence once more, or resume the life he thought he lived.

No movie could follow “The Dark Knight Rises” and expect to do extremely well in the box office, so I think this film will be one of the most underappreciated films of 2012.  The world of “Total Recall” was one of the most fun worlds I’ve seen in a film in a long time.  The futuristic gadgets, from holographic necklaces to cellphones actually INSIDE people’s hands, were very fun to watch and fantasize about afterwords.  I’ve definitely added several items to my christmas list after seeing this movie.

To be honest, I can’t think of any Colin Farrell roles that I’ve been disappointed with, and the same goes for Kate Beckinsale.  (Yes, I know “Click” wasn’t very good, but she was still good in it.)  So all-in-all, this was a pretty decent film.  Farrell and Beckinsale fans shouldn’t be disappointed.

As I said before, this film pushed the boundaries for a PG-13 film, and was quite graphic for the rating.  Parents considering bringing young children to the theaters for this movie should know what they’re getting into before their children are subjected to anything they might deem unsavory.

“Total Recall” is rated PG-13 for intense sequences of sci-fi violence and action (gunplay and explosions typical of an action movie, mild blood, and a character is shot in the head on-screen) some sexual content (a prostitute solicits to a man and some mild suggestive dialogue) brief nudity (a prostitute flashes a man revealing three bare breasts, quite graphically for a PG-13 film) and language (mild profanities throughout and one use of the “F-Word”).