ANON (2018) **

Anon finds writer/director Andrew Niccol back on his bullshit again.  As in The Truman Show, it deals with the concept of people being constantly filmed and/or spied on.  It is also a none-too-subtle cautionary sci-fi tale like Gattaca.  And as with In Time, it features Amanda Seyfried looking hot.  

Set in the near future, Anon paints the picture of a world where everyone has cameras implanted in their eyes.  Since it’s hard to commit crimes when you have a security camera in your retina full time, being a cop is something of a cake walk.  Somehow, someone is getting away with murder by hacking into the peoples’ peepers and erasing and/or manipulating their first-person surveillance footage.  It’s then up to cop Clive Owen to go undercover and draw out the mysterious hacker “Anon” (Seyfried) whose clients keep turning up dead.  

Sad to say, Seyfried is sorely miscast as the titular hacker.  The blame is really a two-way street as Niccol didn’t give her much of a character to work with.  I guess it kinda goes along with the anonymous nature of her character, but you can never quite get a handle on her.  It doesn’t help that her character is more of a machination of the screenplay than a three-dimensional human being.  She’s a wide-eyed innocent waif when it suits the script, and other times, she’s a seductive femme fatale.  She’s never quite able to pull off the many facets of the character, which is a big stumbling block when her identity and motives are crucial to the plot. 

Owen is good though.  He sometimes resembles a world-weary detective straight out of a ‘40s movie that somehow got stuck in a futuristic Philip K. Dick story.  His performance prevents it from completely falling apart, but it’s hardly enough to salvage this slow-moving tale.  It was also nice to see Storm of the Century’s Colm Feore popping up as Owen’s superior.  

It’s a shame too, because Niccol had a kernel of a good idea here.  Ultimately, that’s about what it is.  An idea.  It’s an intriguing premise, but there’s no real substance to hang anything on.  What’s more, the heads-up display on the constant POV shots gets annoying after a while, and the first-person shooter-style scenes are often phony looking.