Joseph Kosinski's sci-fi fable, based on the short story "Escape From Spiderhead," answers the question of what would happen if we plugged, say, Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" into an AI 'bot, and told it to make an action thriller out of it. Maybe the cockroach would go on a killing rampage, and live deep in the sewers, and it would be up to Det. Phoebe Ranch (let's say, played by Jamie Lee Curtis), just a few days short of her retirement, to track down the hairy beast and put an end to its reign of terror on the dirty city above.
Instead, Kosinski's film, from a screenplay adaptation by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, takes George Saunders' wild pharma-satire, about a prison colony in the near future where the convicts are given better living conditions in exchange for endless chemical experiments, and somehow reshapes it into a wildly unsuccessful action/romance. In the film version, the cons are routinely dosed with such things as BlissTyme, ChatEase, and Verbaluce, to establish the next generation of chemical enhancement, while also determining -- Milgram's style -- if after being given a love-inducing drug, the effects last long enough to avoid causing another prisoner psychic harm. The filmmakers have taken a cryptic ode to Capitalism run amok, and turned it into an ill-fitting "Logan's Run"-style thriller.
The elements that work best in the film, needless to say, all come from the original source material: Chris Hemsworth plays the roguishly charismatic Steven Abnesti, the scientist behind the project, and Miles Teller, the long-suffering criminal test subject, Jeff, whose continued empathy for his fellow prisoners mess up Abnesti's experiments.
The setup, the drugs themselves, and the curiously withheld nature of the narrative in the first act hold up pretty well. Kosinski, fresh from his multimillion-dollar blockbuster triumph "Top Gun: Maverick," gets a tangible hold on the atmosphere -- all gleaming chrome and wood, and dampened mood lighting for the prison colony -- but runs into trouble capturing Saunders' playful irreverence.
By the time the script goes off-story, and Jeff is fighting back against Abnesti to save Lizzy (Jurnee Smollett), a young convict with whom he has non-chemically fallen in love, whatever delicate mechanisms left from Saunders' story get tossed by the wayside in place of dumb and dumber plot beats that leave the film dunderingly insipid, and as thematically barren as a night at Olive Garden.