Movie Scene
'Impostor' not all bad, but not very engaging

By Marshall Fine
Westchester (N.Y.) Journal News

IMPOSTOR PG-13 (for profanity, partial nudity and violence). 103 minutes. Gary Sinise stars with Madeleine Stowe in Gary Fleder's "Impostor," a film about Spencer Olham, a future scientist and inventor of a weapon to fight alien attacks who is accused of being an alien. Dimension Films

That's the premise of "Impostor," a film by Gary Fleder adapted from a short story by sci-fi giant Philip K. Dick. Despite its futuristic trappings, however, it's a story about identity and mind games that echoes themes explored in films as varied as "Vanilla Sky," "A Beautiful Mind," "Memento" and even the 2000 Arnold Schwarzenegger film, "The Sixth Day."

Most of those are distinctly better movies. "Impostor" isn't a bad film, but it is workmanlike in ways that rarely engage the brain or the emotions.

Gary Sinise plays Spencer Olham, a scientist in the future at a time when Earth is under attack from a race of aliens known as the Centaurians. Earth scientists have created giant bubble-domes of energy to protect their cities from attacks from outer space; people live in a constant state of tension about further assaults.

Olham, as it turns out, is the inventor of the weapon that could turn the war around and destroy the alien menace. Happily married to a physician (Madeleine Stowe), he is a national hero — or so it seems when he goes to bed one night.

The next morning, however, he is arrested by a seemingly fanatical cop named Hathaway (Vincent D'Onofrio) and accused of being an alien himself. When he refuses to confess, he is shown a video of the last human-looking alien spy Hathaway questioned — who protests his humanity right up to the moment a drill pierces his chest and excavates an implanted explosive.

Once Olham escapes Hathaway's clutches, the film devolves into a formulaic chase. It alternates between violent clashes between Olham and Hathaway's minions and Olham's own efforts to clear himself of the charges.

This story rapidly narrows its options. Though Dick's work often explored the difference between robot and human consciousness (including the novel on which the film "Blade Runner" was based), that's mostly filigree in this version of the conundrum, which is more intent on action thrills than provoking thought.

As actors, Sinise and D'Onofrio are too good to give throwaway performances. But "Impostor" is the kind of disposable film that's probably being packaged for release on home video even as you read this.