Originally one-third of Miramax’s aborted sci-fi anthology Alien Love Triangle, director Gary Fleder’s Impostor clearly should have stayed that way instead of being expanded into a full-length movie. As a half-hour short (which the DVD allows you to see), it’s nice and compact in a perfectly acceptable Twilight Zone-ish way. But multiply that by three, and it only succeeds in not succeeding.
The elfin-faced Gary Sinise (TV’s CSI: NY) stars as Spencer, a weapons designer some 75 years into the future. One day at work, he’s arrested by military man Hathaway (Vincent D’Onofrio, Full Metal Jacket) and assumed to be an android with a bomb in his heart, intended to assassinate a government official.
So is he or isn’t he? Even Spence doesn’t know for sure, but he spends the rest of the movie running and trying to clear his name, making Impostor an uneasy mix of The Fugitive and Minority Report, which, like this, was based on a Philip K. Dick short story.
Somehow, the film seems to progress at half the speed of its on-the-lam main character. This is because it’s padded with repetitious scenes, needless subplots and just plain ol’ drawn-out sequences. Sinise’s miscasting doesn’t help matters; he’s about the most unappealing action hero modern cinema could think up. —Rod Lott