Enhanced: Familiar Mutants Among Us… But Duller Than Ever

By Liam Lacey

Rating: D

A Canadian science fiction action flick, Enhanced is based on a familiar X-Men trope of misunderstood mutants among us.

Developed for military uses, the “enhanced” humans have escaped from a facility and are hiding out among the population. When threatened, they display super-strength and emit electro-magnetic pulses while their eyes light up like Bluetooth signals, which apparently threatens the foundations of society... or at least, it scrambles our wi-fi connections.

In this stilted low-budget drama, the oddballs are being being hunted down by a government squad of stubble-faced men in matching pea jackets. The pea-jacket squad are led by seasoned tough guy George (George Tchortov), taking no-mercy directions from his bureaucratic Captain Williams (Adrian March).

Military characters in Enhanced speak in the sort of jargon that is familiar from video games. To capture the mutants, the agents carry little blue-tipped tasers that look like glow-sticks, and stand in a spearhead formation like a Roman phalanx.

Their initial target is a young woman, Anna (Alanna Bale, whose performance is promising) who lives in her van and works as an assistant garage mechanic. She’s a keep-her-head down quiet employee until she reacts forcefully to some bad guys trying to shake down her boss.

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After an initial skirmish, George and Anna join forces against a common enemy, a robotic alpha mutant David (the director’s brother Chris Mark) who wants to kill off all the other “enhanced” types to absorb their energy, and perhaps provide his character some semblance of a personality.

The explanation for this energy-sucking process is offered by a motormouth scientist named Eli (Michael J. Delaney) who lives in a room behind a storage locker. As with many scenes here, this seems to have been shot on weekends in places when regular people weren’t using them.

Director Mark comes from a background in fight choreography, and the action scenes here are handled competently. Everything else here about Enhanced feels like an enfeebled facsimile of better movies.

Enhanced. Directed by James Mark. Written by James Mark and Matthew Nayman. Starring Alanna Bale, George Tchortov, Adrian March, Michael J. Delaney and Chris Mark. Available on digital video on demand on March 26