I can’t tell—a couple minutes into its whimpering conflation—whether Self/less is fetishistic or promiscuous, which shows a failed Freudian apparatus if there ever was. After dumping its scientistic energy like a stained reality—after giving us yet another guileless spiritual technology—it stays nothing but disappointment, and its ulterior fungibility is stinking or lowly rather than exponential, like a waterlogged mushroom rather than a story proper. It scrimps and bundles its unjust obsession—heart-to-brain, brain-to-heart—like this latter belongs to transcendent Death, like the movie ought to be washed in a higher-order necro- or thana-logic before being acceptable to be shuffled into the foolproof deck of cinematic experience. Eventually a short burst of jockeying perceptual nystagmus links the whole, in a pretty sensible way, to the worst kind of drug experience, to a blot of putrid LSD, and chucks its role of sitter or overseer to British leather forces, so to speak, like we might expect its sour grape to continue independently post-exposure—as if its numskull attitude were ever good enough for shoulder treacle. Then it sits back and coddles the short stick of assimilation, with a conspicuous agenda to canceling enlightenment, a State nature, or both; to this end it swings peanut butter and pills without remorse—the equivalent to its sexual passes—whose measure is sanctified by raving trip, but stuffed unpleasantly with egoistic runoff, giving the viewer an unqualified alchemical chimerism of irritated meaning not unlike hallucinogen persisting perception disorder.
Sir Ben Kingsley is cast poorly as an apathetic twitch in the arms of Big Idea, Big Mind, Big Trust. Ryan Reynolds, on the other hand, is forced to endow his infinitesimal vestiges of pure aggression to the narrative’s genital umbrage, to its drives and curiosities, in much like the form of a military’s stint with itself—like disintegration whose intentionality is fenced-in—and for this affront their cumulative dimness becomes reflected, I guess, elsewhere. Frankly, it is hard not to admit the movie synthesizes waste, which is I suppose why it makes such a big deal of pest control, with its hot shots and raging flames, its infernal places and excoriations under quiescent tempo. I manage to ponder the past only once—past as self-preface and all—when Reynolds flutters his eyes, which goes to show the wrong sort of scampering blue-light arbitrariness, a pinprick in the ides of Man as it were, and I am immediately re-lived with the patient-at-arms, structure, its lack. Finally—only halfway-in—the movie dissolves entirely, just like it had a bad bath, which I take for its resolution, its breakdown, its transmutation, its puddle, its wire, and so on.