Gemini Man finds Will Smith giving all his best as both of the leads in a sci-fi action film. Too bad the rest of the movie doesn’t live up to the star’s potential.

Following a tense and life-awakening mission, an aging government assassin of bad guys, Henry Brogan (Smith), decides to retire. While settling down in rural Georgia, Henry meets Jack Willis (Douglas Hodge), an old friend who reveals that an informant named Yuri (Ilia Volok) told him that the last man Brogan was hired to kill was actually innocent. After discovering that the local boat rental manager, Danny (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), is also a fellow undercover agent, Henry befriends her, and with the help of Baron (Benedict Wong), a former colleague, the trio sets out to meet Yuri for further proof.

On their way there, Danny and Henry start to uncover a plot by Brogan’s former agency to eliminate him for knowing about the deception. Meanwhile, Clay Verris (a stiff Clive Owen), head of a top-secret black ops unit codenamed GEMINI, is also after Henry. He sends Junior, a younger clone of Henry, to eliminate him in a globetrotting adventure of risks and serious soul searching.

It’s bizarre that a project that has been in development since 1997 turned out to be so poorly executed. With an editing pace that feels like one is playing with SIMS computer software in virtual reality, and a lot of bad acting, Gemini reaches a new level of low. The story line has a lot of potential, but it’s all over the place, skipping from one genre to another in seconds, and unlike Brogan, it misses all its targets.

Danny is a great sidekick. Winstead has amazing chemistry with Smith and is perfect as the strong but sympathetic agent. Still, they were both wasted in an unintentionally funny mess, filled with random one-liners and slow reactions that looked like the actors were waiting to be triggered by a computer mouse. The repetitive, over-the-top, one-dimensional dramatic score couldn’t have been more out of place either in a movie with such diverse settings and moods.

The biggest achievement of the film is undoubtedly the re-creation of a shockingly accurate young Will Smith. Yet, an unwanted subplot in an anything’s-possible movie made me think he was going to break the fourth wall and reference Six Degrees of Separation (1993) or even start singing a robotic parody of the famous theme to The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (1990-1996) at the end. The film has future drinking game cult status written all over it.

While the innovative 4K high-frame-rate photography and the effects are impressive, I found myself questioning if they should’ve only been necessary for the creation of Junior and not the entire movie, since the visual essence that defines film as an art form was clearly sucked out of the story. When the cinematography is too bright, it feels like a telenovela from an alternate dimension.

Premiering two weeks after the debut of Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, which also deployed de-aging technology, Gemini Man justifies the effects as a technological experiment, though without any substance.