XChange

XChange (2000): Watch out, it’s another Canadian government supported movie. If you read this column regularly (Is there anyone out there who does?), you know I consider these government supported movies to be mostly snoozers and losers but the Tapehead will have to eat his words on this one. While not a great movie, it is a reasonably well done SF movie about body renting. That is, in the near future, you can occupy someone’s body to save time making a trip somewhere. It is also being used as a kind of voyeur central as many people just switch bodies to have an anonymous night out on the town doing all sorts of naughty things. Poor hero Kim Coates has a business appointment and switches with someone on the other coast so he can make the meeting. As luck would have it, his switchee is a corporate terrorist who doesn’t come back with his body and the somewhat corrupt corporation running the show wants to dump his ‘essence’ into a clone. This sounds ok until he finds out the clone can only live for a couple of weeks so our hero has a major problem if his body is not recovered. Not only that, if the police do find his body, the law requires it to be impounded as evidence until a trial. This naturally irritates our hero a tad and he decides to exceed some government regulations on his own. So, you get an interesting set of conflict resolutions, exotic settings and technology, along with some traditional wooden acting by Stephen Baldwin. But this isn’t too irritating since he plays a clone and apparently, clones don’t have sparkling personalities in the near future. Couple that with the fact that almost every major female starlet’s role contains at least one episode of gratuitous nudity and you have a film that should interest a few people out there. XChange is a reasonably well done science fiction movie with a modest budget. The movie is rated R for; multiple orbulations and bumulations, excessively wooden Baldwin, sending in the clones, guided stealth bullets, multiple assassinations, and for the movies unique extrapolation of what the future holds in cruise missilery and miniaturization.