I was a little dubious of this movie. I love Ryan Reynolds (he used to be my #1 of all time, I have watched almost every single one of his movies) and sci-fi movies in general, so when I got the chance to see Self/Less early, I was on board.

I won’t offer any spoilers in this review. It was a pretty interesting movie, with the premise being that the dying Damian Hale (Ben Kingsley) opts to have his consciousness transferred to an empty vessel of a body that was genetically engineered in a lab for prime performance (that perfect specimen being Ryan Reynolds, of course). As the trailer indicates, he soon finds out that this body does not come with no strings attached and that, in fact, this body had a life and a family. Chaos ensues.

Lemme just say Ryan Reynolds kills it with this movie. He’s been doing a lot of really great work both as a dramatic actor and as an action star. (Also, he looks amazing throughout this entire film, okay? There I said it, the man is a beautiful human specimen.) He plays off the other characters really well and just, I don’t know, he carried the entire film on his shoulders with ease.

Gotta nitpick on Ben Kingsley really quickly: why the awful New York accent, Sir Kingsley? You’re better than this. The accent sounded horrendous, like some terrible mix of his natural British accent and a “New York accent”. It was very sad to hear. He gets top billing in the movie, but he is only in the film for the first 10-15 minutes and then we don’t see anymore of him.

Matthew William Goode plays a much larger role in the movie. He seems to be getting typecast as the brilliant but subtle jack*ss, i.e. in The Imitation Game, and he does a pretty good job of doing it. His character is composed for the entirety of the film in that eerie way that some villains are.

Mmmm I don’t know, I can’t say I loved this movie. The story was not that creative given a pretty cool premise and I didn’t feel much for characters that weren’t played by Ryan Reynolds or Victor Garber. (Always love Victor Garber.) I hear Advantageous, now on Netflix, does the premise better so maybe I’ll check that out.

Self/Less is in theaters today, July 10.