Colin Farrell (Michael Gibson/Columbia Pictures)

Paul Verhoeven’s 1990 Total Recall imagined the year 2084 as a time of brutalist office buildings and full-body x-ray machines that searched anybody using mass transit. Based loosely on a short story by Philip K. Dick, it was prescient, silly and over-the-top violent, as one might expect from the director of Robocop and Showgirls. Even though, it was a brutally enjoyable piece of pulp that was no masterpiece. The way you recall that original movie may totally affect how you respond to Len Wiseman’s reboot. But screenwriters Kurt Wimmer and Mark Bomback haven’t exactly made a faithful remake, and this is a good thing. It stands on its own as as a dystopian paranoid fantasy of the sole remaining future superpowers (though c’mon, Great Britain?), but it works a little better if you know the original.

It begins like the first one, with a dream—but this dream is not on Mars. Colin Farrell fights off an earthly security force when he is captured, leaving partner Melina (Jessica Biel) to escape to freedom without him. He wakes up and is in bed with his wife Kate Beckinsale, which is kind of confusing because I didn’t immediately recognize her as somebody different from Biel. You could call this lazy casting or good casting, because the actresses’ mild similarities to each other—at a distance, my failing eyesight would not be able to distinguish them—plays into the sense of uncertain memory.

Doug Quaid is a factory worker at a plant that manufactures the kind of synthetic police that he battled in his dream, and in a rainy urban landscape clearly modelled after Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, he sees a mobile billboard advertising Rekall, a company that trades in memories that they can implant in your brain as if they were your very own. One co-worker (Bokeem Woodbine) tells him horror stories of Rekall customers who ended up lobotomized, but a new Asian co-worker sells it to him as a good trip. Turned down for a promotion and living in a really depressing time, Quaid finds Rekall situated in a red-light district (vaguely modeled after the Martian red light district in the 1990 film). Rekall tech McLane (John Cho) prepares Quaid for a memory implant in a business space more opium den than industrial park. Because, you know, blame Asia. As he’s being pumped full of new memories, something goes horribly wrong.

Kate Beckinsale and Bryan Cranston (Michael Gibson/Columbia Pictures)

The movie is faithful to the plot arc of Verhoeven’s film, but major and minor changes play with moviegoers memory of the original. This Quaid does not travel to Mars to save the planet. By the end of the 21st century, a prologue title explains, much of Earth was rendered uninhabitable, and the oppression that takes place on Mars in Verhoeven’s concept takes place on Earth. Only the United Federation of Britain and The Colony (Australia) are left, with the sole means of transport between the two being a through-the-earth’s core subway that has the official and heavy-handed title of The Fall.

The Fall is treated like an ordinary transit system – a reliable one anyway. Likewise Farrell is a more reliable actor than Arnold. The Irishman may be buff but he’s no powerful muscle man, and as a more ordinary man his plight feels more grounded. Characters from the original film are changed and combined—Beckinsale is basically both Sharon Stone and Michael Ironside. Ethan Hawke shot scenes for the film that were later scrapped, but interviews with the director suggest that, as much as we might wish otherwise, there were no plans for him to pop out of Bill Nighy’s stomach.

A series of light flares can be seen at regular intervals throughout the film, which might suggest an ambiguity that any of it is really supposed to be happening. Nothing is ever made of this, but this two-hour movie reportedly lost 17 minutes of footage on the digital cutting room floor. Will you still recall it by the time it hits home video? Neither Colin Farrell nor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s version of Douglas Quaid is destined to top anybody’s best films of all time poll. This one is an average summer entertainment, one that passes the time easily enough in a theater, but not one to fondly recall in summers to come.

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Total Recall
Directed by Len Wiseman
Written by Kurt Wimmer and Mark Bomback.
Screen story by Ronald Shusett, Dan O’Bannon, Jon Povill, and Kurt Wimmer based on a short story by Philip K. Dick.
With Colin Farrell, Kate Beckinsale, Jessica Biel, Bryan Cranston, Bill Nighy.
Running time: 121 minutes.
Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of sci-fi violence and action, some sexual content, brief triple-nudity, and language
Opens today at a multiplex near you.