Slater (Lachlan Nieboer) is celebrating his birthday with Nadia (Nora-Jane Noone) who gets abducted for a better life with "Brand New U." Slater wasn't supposed to be there and gets a new life too from an organization which matches a person with someone else and allows them to take over their life. The catch is that they must forgo their past and have no connection to it. So then they place new Slater and new Nadia working in the same building....guess how that works out.The film, when not a confused mess, was a slow moving drama attempting to create confusion as it unravels it. Perhaps hard core science fiction fans might like it, I couldn't get into it. The main characters were boring and lackluster. They seemed to watch Slater every second of every day...except for that one time.Guide: F-word, brief sex. No nudity.

Anyone familiar with that hipster flick "Primer" might get an inkling just how confusing, muddled and outright moronic "Identicals" is. Actually, even "Primer" is like "Dumbo" compared to this - simplistic: that should tell you quite a lot. I've seen over 3,700 movies so far, and I've never - literally never - seen a movie as utterly devoid of sense and logic as this almost randomly put-together drivel. There is no point to this mess, none whatsoever. What kind of a world do the characters inhabit? No info. Present or future? Zip. Why are people being altered? Nope, the director doesn't know either. For what purpose are they being cloned? Sorry, nothing. Who else knows about this mysterious corporation aside from the people it pointlessly tortures? Can't help you there, because there's literally not even a hint of a clue of an indication to even contemplate answering that question. What changes about the main character, if he even does change? Nope, sorry. Which is the real brunette? Nope. What the hell is going on? I have no clue; no-one does. (That includes the few glue-sniffing hipsters who convinced themselves that they understood this mess.) Why does the corporation resort to beating up its clients when their scientific methods fail to work? (Admittedly, that was kind of funny, if unintentionally. Imagine that: a mega-powerful corporate entity that devises all these advanced technological cloning/brainwashing/whatever techniques, and yet they resort to the old-boot-in-the-groin method when things don't go as planned! Very Python-like.) What's the basic story? I really couldn't tell you, and neither could the lazy writer-director. Who is what and where is why? Now we're getting closer. That's more like the kind of question this movie deserves, because idiotic movies don't deserve intelligent/normal questions. So in that vein, who's the guy who said that thing just before that thing happened that made no sense just after the main character said something to that other guy? I can't answer that either, but somehow I'm more at ease with such questions, when it comes to "reviewing" a pile of pig-dung such as this pretentious, "arty" mess.The only clues you ever get in this pile of scorpion-vomit is in the first 5 minutes: they tell you that the movie will be incomprehensible and unwatchable. So what I said earlier about the movie not offering any clues whatsoever is not entirely true, technically speaking at least. Such is the blatant incompetence of this movie's coke-sniffing "auteur" that the movie's first 5 minutes already prepare you for an excruciatingly dull experience. Not only is the utter confusion of the script very obvious from the get-go, but the movie's extremely slow pace becomes a serious problem soon thereafter.Alex, your cue.I kid you not, oh my Brothers, but when I viddied how boring this movie is, I started fast-forwarding it and the like. Despite that, oh my Brothers, the movie still seemed to move at a snail's pace! Suddenly I had the urge for a bit of the old' ultra-violence. I viddied myself tolchoking the actors and the director and everyone else involved in this gloopy film, and what heavenly visions of the red red kroovy I had, oh my Brothers! It was as beautiful as Beethoven's 9th to imagine myself and my three droogs smashing the director's empty golova. We always rather enjoyed beating up on those sophistos which you may know as hipsters these days, oh my Brothers, but for this scribbler-director our gang would have had a special kind of horrorshow cocktail of chains and nozhys reserved.Thank you, Alex, always a pleasure to hear your take.Sure, it doesn't take much to get Alex to go mental on people, waving around with his fists and knives, but surely anyone who saw the film must share at least the basic sentiment of Alex. This shoddy film does indeed move at a snail's pace and has absolutely zero logic. Literally nothing is explained to the suffering viewer who doesn't get 5 unknowns and 23 "knowns" so that he at least has a mathematical shot at finding the answers. No, this is an unsolvable riddle, with 29 unknowns and maybe 2 or 3 "knowns". And lest you fall into that classic hipster trap of thinking that your imaginary mighty intellect can figure this out as some kind of a puzzle movie, rest assured that there ARE no answers because this isn't a riddle. Anyone who mistakes random garbage for an intellectual riddle needs a good tolchoking from Alex and his droogs. And I mean that with the best of intentions: the pummeling might result in an accidental lobotomy which I am sure greatly increases odds of "de-hipstertization".Come to think of it, I am not even sure this non-cinematic aberration can qualify as a movie. It has actors, yes. But it has no plot.The overacting by the lead actor doesn't help either. This chump looks like a kid who just got out of drama school (the Nick Cage department), raring to show what he's got. He hasn't got squat: no charisma at all. But at least he has a penchant for contorting his face whenever playing the evil twin, which is good if you're into cheesy, broad performances and other types of celluloid buffoonery. I hated the female lead too; if that's attractive and sexy, I don't know what's ugly then.

I loved this film. Picture the near future where a secret organisation Brand New U finds copies of people (Identicals) and when you are unhappy with your life you get moved to the - hopefully better - life of that copy. That copy is moved on to another life as well or killed. The main character is at the wrong place at the wrong time and witnesses his girlfriend being replaced. He himself them gets caught in a succession of lives, while looking for his girlfriend from his first life.Although the film has thriller aspects, it is not a real thriller in the way that the main character resolves his problems and punishes the bad guys. It is more about making choices who you are, who you want to be, looking at all the options your Identicals show you.

So some of the big questions are never answered, like why did they come to take his girlfriend in the first place. Then, after the replacement girlfriend died, why didn't they abort the mission and leave the real girlfriend there. And why these abductors choose such a bad time to abduct, couldn't they have pulled her off the street into a van, no, they show up at the house, hoping that the girlfriend answers the door, but no, lets point a gun at the boyfriend and demand to know where the girlfriend is, when she is just in the bedroom asleep, simply stupid. The abductors dumb planning led to the replacement girlfriend getting killed, so they framed the boyfriend as a murderer instead of disposing of the body. And why are they switching out people anyway, would someone really pay for that, yeah, give me some other persons face and I'll take over their lives, not knowing any details of the relationship they'll be in. So you can't have two identical's occupying the same living area but the whole last part of the film had the main character conflicting with himself. And they let him smuggle a picture into his new life, but then put him in close proximity to his girlfriend so he can hook back up with her. At that point why didn't he tell her the whole plot and run to the police, see I didn't murder my girlfriend, shes right here. No, I need to have a final showdown with my identical and kill him. This movie made me angry and frustrated because it was so poorly written. I found the positive reviews of this movie laughable, are they paid plugs? I can usually make sense out of a movie when others don't and this one, it was just a bad script and the movie has plot holes that could sink the titanic.