Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Infinite’ on Paramount+, Where Mark Wahlberg Does The Mind-Warp Again

The science-fiction-action mirepoix of Infinite (Paramount Plus) feels undercooked and burned all at once. Here, the profound ability of conscious reincarnation is wielded by a handful of people as a cudgel for control over karma. But when Mark Wahlberg feels the vibrations, it’s all this funky bunch can do to try and thwart the world-ending aspirations of one of their own. Wahlberg isn’t the only one who’s seen all of this before.

INFINITE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Evan McCauley (Mark Wahlberg) is a diagnosed schizophrenic with violent tendencies who pops psychotropic pills like candy because it’s his only means of muting volatile mental episodes, immersive living dreams that seem to carry him off to other times, other places, other activities, with a tangibility that’s palpable. As it turns out, that’s because it is. Evan is harboring the reincarnated consciousness of a guy named Heinrich Treadway, a hero to those few human beings gifted with perfect recall of their past lives — you know, the Infinites — because in one of his own (seen a flashback where Treadway is played by Dylan O’Brien), he busted into the lab of Bathurst (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and stole the method to his madness. Who’s Bathurst? Well, he was once a well-behaved Infinite. But it was somewhere around 218 bce and the Second Punic War that he got fed up with all the reincarnating, and the good Infinites have been beating back his efforts at destruction ever since.

Evan is whisked into this shadow world of multi-generational quarreling by Nora (Sophie Cookson), who delivers him to the modernist corporate retreat facility she and her cohort call home. Well, they call it “The Hub,” but that’s only mentioned in passing, so it’s better to drill into some of the other terminology at hand. Nora and her pals, a group including the brilliant Dr. Garrick (Liz Carr) and warrior-class toughs Trace (Kae Alexander) and Kovic (Johannes Haukur Johannesson), aim to extract Treadway from Evan by “retraining neural pathways,” since “memories are held in every organ.” Wahlberg, as Evan, screws his face into skeptic panic. But Garrick has the last word. “Don’t worry. All this shit? It just gets weirder.”

Infinite then prattles off to Europe, with Evan/Treadway and Nora hot on Bathurst’s trail as he gets ever closer to realizing his dastardly plan, which boils down to global destruction in service of his finding mental peace. Somebody get this guy a white noise machine, jeez. But nobody does, and Mark Wahlberg is forced to deploy the only other option, which of course is to land his motorcycle on the wing of an airborne C-5 Galaxy and cut into the fuselage with his trusty katana. What does all of this have to do with reincarnation? Well, you might ramp your bike onto a moving plane, too, if mortality was a fluid concept.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? As Nora, Evan’s goodhearted Infinite comrade, Sophie Cookson is given a sliver of character development less than one inch thick. She yearns, you see, forever pining across the metaphysical plain for her soulmate, who was known as Abel when they died together in their most recent life, cut down by a special weapon Bathurst calls the dethroner. It’s a sad story! But it’s also one that was portrayed with greater strength and emotion by Luca Marinelli and Marwan Kenzari in The Old Guard, a more soundly-executed recent film with similar themes of immortality and the generational drift of ass-kicking. Speaking of that dethroner, Wanted (2008) did custom firearms and curving munitions better, not to mention constructing a more fully realized shadow world.

Performance Worth Watching: Infinite isn’t just a hodgepodge of sci-fi gobbledygook with no place to go. Its cast is just seat-filling, too. Cookson? She sets her jaw, but really anyone of any gender could’ve played her role. Even Wahlberg is interchangeable here — he’s a streetwise skeptic one minute, spitting out put-downs the next, and going full action hero by the finale, but all that forms is an after-image of Wahlbergian charisma. If Dylan O’Brien, who plays the past-life version of Wahlberg’s character, would have been its top line star, Infinite would quite possibly be exactly the same movie.

Memorable Dialogue: In Bathurst’s opinion, the ultimate torture isn’t physical. It’s human stupidity. “Being surrounded by it!” he rages at Toby Jones, who only appears in Infinite for like maybe two scenes. “Engulfed in it! Lifetime after lifetime. People with their idiot grins!” Chiwetel Ejiofor is really leaning into it now. “Their infuriating pleasantries! Their need for approval!” Then he bites down hard on the villainous nadir. “Their unctuous attempts to be loved and validated!” Ejiofor’s scrumptious erudition aside, Bathurst basically wants to destroy every living thing on earth because he’s sick and tired of having to make small talk.

Sex and Skin: Nothing but Mark Wahlberg shirtless in the memory probing lab (everybody knows that diode-lattice mask won’t operate if your torso’s clad in cotton), Mark Wahlberg shirtless doing dead-hang inverted sit-ups (anyone for a Pain & Gain reset?), and Mark Wahlberg shirtless inside Jason Mantzoukas’s iron lung-cum-womb simulator.

Our Take: Infinite went through a couple of rewrites and script tweaks on the way from the novel it’s based on translating into a script and then appearing on screen as this thing, a sci-fi/actioner with its game pieces strewn across the board in a disordered, uneven mess. The film’s theatrical release got caught up in the COVID-19 fallout, then got delayed entirely, and finally landed with a thud on brand-new streamer Paramount Plus, where it doesn’t seem likely to magnetize viewers. Infinite sputters with experiments with voiceover before letting side characters appear to spew reams of expositional dialogue, but very little of it amounts to anything, and director Antoine Fuqua instead drops in random action sequences that feel disconnected entirely from the reincarnation warfare at the supposed center of all of this. Implausibility can be an asset in contemporary science-fiction. In the case of Infinite, it just makes you bored.

And about that dethroner. Bathurst’s firearm — envisioned as a kind of gilded blunderbuss — apparently fires a shell packed with tech to extract an Infinite’s consciousness and store it on a digital chip. So, Altered Carbon references aside, this is an idea worth exploring. But Infinite never does that, and instead leaves its souls as pawns in its ponderous, unlikely finale. And what about the Aston Martin Vantage that Sophie Cookson drives through a wall, and then the interior of a police station, and then a series of holding cells? Infinite slaps some tech on that thing, too, like a disappearing cow-catcher grill and a steering column that moves freely between the two front seats. Wow, what? Cool! Well, maybe, only you never see it again. Infinite is so busy setting up its next cluttered bit of exposition that it never connects its own dots. And all of that is before Jason Mantzoukas pilots a gunship into the teeth of Bathurst’s private army and air drops Wahlberg’s armored dune buggy onto the battlefield. In each of these sequences, something cool happens. But taken together, they lose focus. Infinite makes you remember things differently, or even like another movie.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Occasionally explosive, but rarely coherent, Infinite is an extremely muddled take on action sequences and reachy science fiction circumstances, ahem, “reincarnated” from other films.

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges

Watch Infinite on Paramount+