In Surrogates, humans stay at home and use mind-controlled robots—custom-built to resemble their operators’ idealized selves—to live their lives for them. If only Paul Verhoeven or Kathryn Bigelow had been able to exert a similar form of control over this movie, which lacks the panache of a Total Recall or a Strange Days. But as a brisk whodunit in which it’s obvious who did it, Surrogates delivers the goods with more visual confidence and wit than you’d expect from an assembly-line Matrix wannabe. That Willis’s döppelganger appears to be wearing a bad toupee is only the movie’s funniest joke.

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