Word: verhoeven
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Directed by Paul Verhoeven...
TOTAL RECALL Directed by Paul Verhoeven...
...script that kicked around Tinseltown for more than a decade. (Here's one, originally written in 1979, name of Total Recall.) Then, in these days of multinational superproductions, you want it to star an Austrian, be directed by a Dutchman, and cost about $60 million. (Total Recall, a Paul Verhoeven film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.) You want it to boast elaborate sets and gadgety special effects. (TR created a Martian colony on a Mexican soundstage.) You want it to blend science fiction, action adventure and suspense. (TR filches blithely from Star Wars and Blade Runner, from RoboCop and Hitchcock films...
...first two-thirds, Total Recall has it all: the sleek confidence of big-budget picture making at its most inventive. It zaps out beguiling images so quickly that viewers may want to see the film over again right away, just to catch what they missed. Verhoeven seems to have assumed that today's moviegoers have a megabyte media intelligence; then he worked like crazy to overload it. When Total Recall is cooking, it induces visual vertigo...
...just $13 million, Executive Producer Jon Davison (Airplane!) has put together a sci-fi fantasy with sleek, high-powered drive. And Paul Verhoeven, the Dutch director (Soldier of Orange) making his Hollywood debut, has polished the look of the film until it is seamless and pretty near soulless. Hubcaps slice off a speeding car like saw-toothed Frisbees, and gruesome death is just another way of saying "That's life." No wonder the film was almost rated X for violence; it is crazy in love with the imagination of disaster. It wants to caress the special effect...