An extremely wealthy elderly man dying from cancer undergoes a radical medical procedure that transfers his consciousness to the body of a healthy young man but everything may not be as good as it seems when he starts to uncover the mystery of the body's origins and the secret organization that will kill to keep its secrets.
There's no reason to spoil what follows except to say that even by the standards of both Alfred Hitchcock and science fiction, it's nonsensical.
– Wesley Morris,
Grantland,
10 Jul 2015
rotten:
Deep under the skin of this shrug of a movie is a solid metaphor rooted in an appealing fantasy.
– Tasha Robinson,
NPR,
12 Jul 2015
rotten:
What starts out as an interesting exploration of identity soon gives way to the uninspired, generic action flick we had feared it always was.
– Bilge Ebiri,
New York Magazine/Vulture,
12 Jul 2015
rotten:
Tarsem Singh has a reputation for making movies that are visually stunning but woefully inert and convoluted in their storytelling (see The Cell and The Fall). Singh's most recent film, Self/less, lives up to at least half of that reputation.
– Nathan Rabin,
Globe and Mail,
13 Jul 2015
rotten:
A sci-fi thriller so derivative of John Frankenheimer's masterfully paranoid Seconds it would be more accurate to call it Thirds, Tarsem Singh's Self/less is a generic waste of a clever idea.