Surrogate—a person appointed to act for another; a substitute. To put in the place of another; replace.

If you could have a substitute to live your life for you—a way for you to experience everything you want in life with none of the risk—would you want to live life through that filter? A heady question, I know; but aren't we already starting to do that? We "stay in touch" through MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and every other app on the iPhone. We have "adventures" as blood-elves and dwarves in far off mystical lands in cyber space—virtual worlds of warcraft you might say. More and more we are filtering our experiences and relationships through technology, but how far might that go? Bruce Willis' new movie Surrogates looks at one possible answer to that question, but it doesn't spend much time pondering the question or the answer as it goes about the business of executing an average action thriller.

In Surrogates people are living out their lives through the use of robot substitutes. These surrogates allow people to go about their daily lives without any fear of harm or worry of any risk to themselves. Plus, surrogates give people a chance to live out their fantasies as they can look like they've always wanted to look and act like they've always wanted to act. After all, there's no fear of harm or consequences, so people are finally free to experience "life... only better."

As you might expect, not everyone is quite as taken with these robot substitutes as others. Bruce Willis' Greer thinks of them more as tools and machines than replacements, using his for work but "unplugging" and walking around his house as himself when work is over. His wife doesn't quite share the same view, and tensions rise. The real problem, however, is that someone really doesn't like surrogates at all and thinks the world would be better off without them. However, the device they want to use to take down surrogates also kills the operator, and so the threat to the surrogates becomes a threat to all humanity, and Bruce Willis has to rediscover his human grit and determination to save everyone else.

This is a fairly typical role for Willis, but he knows how to do it and do it well. This isn't anything we haven't seen from him before, but it is fun to see a younger version of himself when he's using his surrogate to chase down the bad guys. Still, no one looks quite as tough as the older, grizzled, goateed, and bald Willis sporting some cuts and bruises and wearing a dirty leather jacket. It's the epitome of tough, and Willis as always executes perfectly. The rest of the cast, and really the rest of the movie, is fairly bland but serviceable. No one really stands out, but that also means no one stands out for any incredibly bad performances either.

This competent but not excellent air carries over from the cast to the film itself. Surrogates was much better than I was expecting, but it wasn't as good as it could have been. At just under ninety minutes, it's a brisk but fun ride. Apparently the filmmakers were smart enough to realize they didn't need to add any unnecessary elements to the story in order to make it longer just for the sake of making it longer like some other movies have (*cough* Transformers 2 *cough*). At the same time, however, the movie moves so briskly it doesn't stop and dwell on some of the more interesting ideas the whole premise raises. Scenes such as Bruce Willis getting used to walking around the real world without his surrogate and being terrified of everything around him are far too brief. More time on elements such as these would have added some richness and depth to an intriguing idea. As it is, Surrogates moves quickly through its intriguing though sometimes confusing plot and delivers solid if unspectacular action.

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