I agree with most of this. It was a bizarre bundle of nonsense and pointlessness. The incredibly clunky way they shoe horned in references to the original was bizarre. 3 boob girl isn't a mutant (that whole sub plot doesn't exist) and doesn't even get them out, so is essentially just some girl who walks into a scene and goes "hey, I've got 3 boobs. You can't see 'em though" but 2 weeks lady is really cack handed and weird. They linger on her quite deliberately, and even cut back to her a few times, in a sort of self congratulatory way, but since she plays no actual part in the scene, and is there entirely as an easter egg, it's comes off as really jarring. Anyone who doesn't know she's 2 weeks lady would be made to think she's of some importance to the scene, but she's not. It's basically the complete opposite of how to handle that kind of easter egg homage.
But the really annoying thing is that all the new stuff they add in has no reason for being in a Total Recall remake. The whole premise of being set in a futuristic Britain (with New York subway stations and trains, but with TFL branding that somehow manage to travel hundreds of miles outside London, possibly even England to a part of the countryside still populated by London buses) and an Australia where no one is Australian and everyone is Chinese for no reason isn't a terrible idea, but why does it need to be in this film? Why couldn't they have just made a film about that?
Ditto the Blade Runner hovercar chase. Why not just make a film about future Britain and Chinese Australia with a hovercar chase in it? Why did they put a bad Total Recall remake around it? And why is Len Wiseman obsessed with trying to turn his wife into an action hero?
- 5/10