What is it with Ryan Reynolds and body-swap movies? He had one in the comedy The Change-Up (2011), as a single guy who switches identities with Jason Bateman’s uptight married man, and another in the sci-fi thriller Self/Less (2015), playing a young soldier whose firm young body is bought by an ageing, lizardly plutocrat played by Ben Kingsley. Now it’s happening again, in this ridiculous and unpleasantly violent thriller directed by Ariel Vromen.
Reynolds is a young CIA agent on the streets of London who has some vital, top-secret info in his head. After he has (apparently) died, taking the secret with him, the CIA top brass use some state-of-the-art body-swap medical technology – developed by an outrageously unlikely boffin played by, of all people, Tommy Lee Jones – to transfer this information along with all his memories into the brain of an imprisoned criminal tough guy played by Kevin Costner, who quite simply goes ape.
There is some divertingly brash location work on the streets of London, and Costner carries it off with a certain growly-voiced deadpan. Like Liam Neeson, he could get a late-career boost in the action genre. But the extreme ridiculousness of everything lets it down, and the violence is deeply misjudged.
