The First ‘Self/less’ Trailer Asks If You’d Take A Life To Be Ryan Reynolds

Did you ever see the movie Seconds and think it could use less Rock Hudson and more Ryan Reynolds, have a much worse title, and be directed by Tarsem Singh (The Cell, The Fall) so it’ll at least look resplendent if nothing else? Well, here’s the first trailer for Self/less, opening July 31.

Focus Features advertised the trailer’s debut by sending out LG phones to several movie bloggers. (I didn’t get one, but Vince did, and one of his friends dunked the phone in a toilet before he could figure out what movie it was promoting.)

Deadline explains:

“We offer humanity’s greatest minds more time to fill their potential.” Nice pitch. But later it’s revealed that “immortality has some side effects.” […] A megarich and self-involved architect (Ben Kingsley) who’s dying of cancer [undergoes] a procedure that puts him in the body of a healthy younger man (Ryan Reynolds).

But being in the body of Ryan Reynolds isn’t all fast cars, flyboarding, and watching Mariana Paola Vicente strip. There’s also the pesky matter of having flashbacks from the life of the person whose body you stole. You mean taking an offer of eternal life from Ozymandias might be a bad idea? Sacre bleu!

I never thought I’d see a trailer with a cast I like and a director I love and yet have so little interest in seeing the movie. I think it’s the liquor commercial/rap video breakdown in the middle that lost me. It’s all like gold teeth, Grey Goose, trippin’ in the bathroom, bloodstains, ball gowns, trashin’ the hotel room. I don’t care.

×