The new movie “Reminiscence”, starring Hugh Jackman is one of those rare bad movies that it is extremely hard to review, because it is so bad. I have often wondered, how many bad movies can a very famous actor can make before their career goes south? Without a doubt, this is the worst movie Hugh Jackman has ever made, so bad that its impossible to understand how he could have read the script and agreed to act in this film. I have always known that there are actor/studio contracts that are signed and favors that are agreed to in Hollywood. I have seen way too many movies like this one, where a named actor has made a movie that they should have known from the script, was too bad to make.

The plot is absurd, the story starting sometime in the future, with the city of Miami completely flooded because of Global Warming. In the future, there is a machine that can read peoples brain waves displaying their thoughts on a computer screen. This idea reminded me of the 1983 movie “Brainstorm”, the last movie for Natalie Wood. In that movie, they were able to record brain images for people at the moment they died, resulting in some memorable scenes and a pretty good film. In this movie, the main character Nick Bannister played by Jackman is trying to find out what has happened to his girlfriend Mae, played by Rebecca Ferguson, by using this brain wave machine. Actress Thandiwe Newton plays Emily, Nick’s friend who throughout this film, tries to talk him out of everything he is doing. Admittedly while watching this film on HBO Max, I fast-forwarded the movie too many times, at 15 second intervals, because this movie was so hard to sit through.

By the time you are 85% through this very bad movie, you are more interested in it ending, than ever caring enough to fully understand what is happening in this very poorly told story.

The Rotten Tomatoes rating for this film is an extremely low 37%, and I agree with this assessment, suggesting that this movie should just die in a DVD graveyard.