Infinite is endlessly disappointing.
Had I watched Infinite before I slogged through The Old Guard 2, there’s a chance I might have gone easier on the latter because regardless of how it squanders its predecessor’s potential, it’s still streets ahead of this sloppy science fiction smoothie that takes a bunch of influences and ideas and throws them into a visual effects blender until they’re reduced to a thin, mushy mess.
It is, technically, adapted from The Reincarnationist Papers, a novel with an intriguing premise of a secret society of people who remember all their past lives. The source material leans into the rich topics of history, philosophy and identity; but this film adaptation leans more into slow-motion motorcycle sword fights, exploding memory eggs and digital sets with so little weight they barely register on your eyeballs. You can almost feel the script trying to push away the book’s more thoughtful themes like a child nudging brussels sprouts or broccoli to the edge of the plate to hide beneath mashed potatoes. Visually and thematically, there’s just no depth to anything; the film is far too busy with bang-bang nonsense to bother with it.
It’s a shocking misfire for Antoine Fuqua, a director with a track record of elevating pulp (Training Day, The Equalizer) but he’s floundering here. It’s not just that the tone is uneven or that the action lacks spatial clarity and the plot is, well, incoherent is being kind. It’s that the whole production feels like it was made by committee, and each member given a different brief. It flirts with lore, hints at the trauma of multiple, unending existences, but none of it sticks. Fuqua has worked with intensity before; but this feels detached in a way that only cashing a cheque from a streaming service can manifest.
Perhaps Fuqua’s failure is in the lack of a counterbalance, a collaborator with skill and gravitas. In place of Denzel Washington, he has to make do with Mark Wahlberg, who brings little to proceedings apart from his trademark looking perma-baffled and slightly angry. There’s no denying he does his best “confused but trying” face, delivering every line like he’s just been handed the script on set but even then, there are moments where it feels like he’s reading the film’s own Wikipedia summary for the first time, while we all watch, and reacting like a pensioner trying to set the clock on a microwave oven.
At this point, woefully-miscast Wahlberg is probably a genre all of its own and in Infinite he’s miscast in the same way that Tom Cruise was in Spielberg’s War Of The Worlds. Wahlberg radiates “everyman” energy; he’s so unremarkable it’s almost uncanny. He doesn’t play characters so much as he embodies the uneasy idea of a guy who might understand what’s going on if you gave him one more scene and a sandwich. He’s got that blank-slate, Boston-muttered pragmatism that works in gritty, small-scale action (Lone Survivor, Deepwater Horizon) but falls apart the moment you ask him to shoulder metaphysics. Cruise – who radiates anything but everyman energy – always has that sci-fi shimmer in his gaze, like he knows where the next dimension is and has completed the application process. That ineffable cult-leader confidence would’ve been right at home in Infinite’s universe of reincarnated warriors and secret cabals and he’s have bought into the nonsense so hard you might’ve gone along with him. War of the Worlds asked Cruise to convincingly play a blue-collar single dad called Ray, as if the man who scaled the Burj Khalifa for fun had ever set foot in a B&Q. I’m not saying Cruise and Wahlberg are in any way interchangeable but Cruise would have suited this material better and Wahlberg would probably have been a better pick for the Martian invasion.
The reason “woefully-miscast Wahlberg” is nearing genre status is, of course, that he’s often the fallback option. Chris Evans was originally attached, and while that might not have salvaged the film, it would at least have given it an actor capable of projecting internal conflict without looking like he’s misplaced his keys.
The supporting cast do their jobs, and that job is mostly trying not to look too embarrassed to be there. It can’t be this easy being the best actor in any given scene outside of working with Pierce Brosnan but credit where credit’s due. They put in the effort. Chiwetel Ejiofor commits admirably as villain Bathurst, whose entire motivation boils down to “I’ve seen too much, and now I’m tired” – a sentiment to which Infinite’s audience can, at least, relate. There’s probably something profound to be said about the existential exhaustion of infinite memory, but the film isn’t interested in saying it. Instead, he forges bullets that trap souls and sulks in various high-tech bunkers while declaiming iron pyrite gems like “Bring me the Egg” with all the weight and Shakespearean majesty he can summon. Sophie Cookson, Toby Jones and Jason Mantzoukas all show up, all try, and all get chewed to various degrees up by a film that doesn’t know how to use them well.
The action is shredded to ribbons by incoherent editing, the effects are serviceable in a tax-rebate kind of way, and the whole enterprise feels like it was reverse-engineered from better movies by an algorithm. There’s no texture, no tension, no reason to care. It’s spectacle as static, a noise machine that thinks reincarnation means you can blow up the same person twice. Even its philosophical points are hollow, a kindergarten Cloud Atlas. The Wachowskis used their nested reincarnation epic to ask questions about legacy and morality (and variety and nuance from its cast). Infinite uses it to justify warehouse shootouts and airborne sword duels. The weight of eternity is reduced to the weightlessness of wire-fu.
Infinite might have wanted to be a thought-provoking sci-fi thriller but it fails on all three counts. There’s no real sci-fi here, barely any thrills and the only thought it provokes is “how much longer does this have to go?”. As a concept, reincarnation offers limitless possibilities. As a film, Infinite offers Wahlberg talking to a hallucinated blacksmith and getting in a fight on a cargo plane in an action sequence that’s almost a shot for shot remake of that accidentally released trailer of 2017’s The Mummy where the audio was incomplete and it won’t surprise you to learn that The Mummy’s trailer ends up being the more entertaining.
Infinite isn’t just a bad film, it’s an all-fronts creative misfire that wastes an intriguing idea, a talented director, and an entire supporting cast on a leading man who’s not just miscast, he’s cosmically wrong.
