Vice (2015)

Vice (2015) arrives with the confidence of a film that believes it has something to say and the budget of a film that cannot afford to say it well. Bruce Willis plays Julian Michaels, proprietor of a resort where paying customers act out their ugliest impulses on androids who believe themselves human. Thomas Jane is the detective who wants it shut down. Ambyr Childers is Kelly, the gynoid who becomes self-aware, escapes, and returns with a virus and a vendetta. The ensemble is almost entirely white, a demographic fact the film never notices and never troubles itself to address. On matters of orientation, race, climate, and body, the film is a vacuum. It simply has no interest.

There is a feminine pulse here, faint as it is. Kelly is exploited, killed, and resurrected for the amusement of men, and when she finally turns on her abusers it lands as genre revenge, not thesis. The film gestures at a critique of the corporation that commodifies her, noting the tax revenue Vice generates and the bribes that keep it running, and for a moment the machinery of profit looks like the real villain. Then the shooting resumes. A detective mutters that the resort desensitizes its patrons to violence and rape, which is the closest the screenplay comes to an argument. The action sequences swallow it whole.

We are left with a hodgepodge of borrowed ideas, reviewed unkindly at the time and remembered barely at all. It wants the shine of dystopian satire and settles for mercenaries in corridors. The progressive content, such as it is, registers as ambient noise rather than intent. A weary viewer can admire the efficiency of a film that checks so few boxes while trying so hard to mean something. Then Michaels' eyes open, because of course they do, and the credits roll on a sequel that never came.