A laughable hybrid of superhero film, Highlander, Altered Carbon and Wanted, Infinite is a sorry, overly familiar mess based on D. Eric Maikranz’s book The Reincarnationist Papers. A miscast Mark Wahlberg plays Evan McCauley, a man who via clumsy voiceover tells us he is a schizophrenic who somehow knows how to make samurai swords and fails to really recognize himself in the mirror. That is because he is an Infinite, reincarnated into several bodies over the centuries – and he needs to defend the world from Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Bathurst, who wants to find an egg that will destroy life on Earth.
Helping him to recover his memories from past lives, locate the egg and brush up on his fighting skills are Sophie Cookson’s Nora, Jóhannes Jóhannesson’s axe-wielding Viking type and Liz Carr’s M-like exposition mouthpiece Garrick. There’s also Jason Mantzoukas, supposedly amusing light relief as a fixer of Wahlberg’s memories.
It’s all utter nonsense – glib and empty, with plenty of CGI-abetted action sequences. A terribly clunky script attempts to set up a mythology under Antoine Fuqua’s functional direction; Ejiofor tries his best to give his baddy gravitas, but Wahlberg woodenly smarms, looking as unconvinced by the film as we are. An incredibly over the top finale manages to pilfer from Inception, Moonraker and the Fast & Furious series to underwhelming effect.
What does give the film a certain cache, for Welsh viewers at any rate, are the sequences shot in Cardiff: mayhem at the doubling-for-New York City Road junction, Bute Park also stepping in for Central Park. Apart from these brief moments of interest, Infinite is infinitely avoidable.
Dir: Antoine Fuqua (12A, 104 mins)
Streaming now via Amazon Prime
words KEIRON SELF