TR sucked balls the size of Mars, in my humble but appropriate opinion.
Well, I have two films I like: Soldier of Orange and Robocop. In general I find his films rather clumsy and in-your-face, no film goes by with a usually inappropriate amount of ****, sex, shit, violence and whatever, all based on some misconstrued idea of realism. Plus he doesn't know how to pace himself. Total Recall has a great concept, I'm an avid fan of Philip K. Dick and the short story is great. I think they turned the film into an action flick and suffers from many quite boring fights. It's like you have a commercial breakevery five minutes: five minutes of story, five minutes of fighting, five minutes of story, five minutes of fighting. That bothers the hell out of me. I had exactly the same problem with Basic Instinct - too many, too long boring sex scenes. They're all the same and it slows the story down. Sometimes his fixation seems to be on the sex/shit/violence scenes and not so much on the story. And again, that bothers the hell out of me.
Dont get me wrong, Im only talking about Robocop and Total Recall specifically, (not commenting on his other stuff so much)
Robocop's pacing was perfect. Never missed a beat.
There wasnt really any sex in it, either. And its the classic it is because it had a very strong human story along with the violence imho.
The three tittied mutant in the bar was about the only sexual thing in Total Recall, beyond innuendo/verbal references.
True though about Basic Instinct. I never really considered it to be his best works. Stuff like Fatal Attraction which preceeded it was better.
I am yet to read "Wholesale" and thusly Im not (at present) irritated by discrepacies /inconsinstancies in relation to it.
Boring fights..?
Yeah, they were boring. Just emptying a couple of guns and shooting everything to pieces is fun the first time, but every fight in TR was about the same. My comparison is that TR had a lot of boring fights, BI had a lot of boring sex scenes. the first one's nice but after that they're all the same. Take most of them out, the film gets shorter and prolly better.
And there are no discepancies in Wholesale...don't get me wrong. Whole sale tells about the first half hour of Total Recall. It's a short story. Much the same as Minority Report is less than the first hour from the film. But there they added a good continuum with censoring of the precog's mother's murder and the precog orgins. That bit was very much in the spirit of Dick and made full very good film. In TR it's like the idea's there, but it gets covered by a lot of guns that it becomes a basic chase movie. And that doesn't do credit to the world of paranoia that Dick created in all his work IMHO.