Early on in the slick, silly thriller “Self/less,” the obscenely rich New York real estate developer played by Ben Kingsley undergoes a sci-fi procedure in which his personality is transferred out of his dying body and into the brand-spanking-new frame of Ryan Reynolds.
His gain. Our loss.
The movie takes a decent “Twilight Zone” idea -- what if you had a second chance at youth? -- and runs it into the ground with watchable but diminishing returns. Actually, the germ of the film dates back to the 1966 John Frankenheimer movie “Seconds,” in which aging banker John Randolph awoke to find he’d become Rock Hudson. But that movie had an existential spin befitting its era, and “Self/less” just wants to keep the twists, chases, and implausibilities coming as fast as possible.
The early scenes with Kingsley are choice, the actor playing Master of the Universe Damian Hale with verve and a big, honking outer-borough accent. He lives the palatial lifestyle of Donald Trump (in whose Tower some scenes were filmed) but with twice the brains. Make that five times the brains. Damian has terminal cancer, though, and he regrets making a mess of his relationship with his daughter, who runs a vague downtown non-profit and is played, very briefly, by Michelle Dockery of “Downton Abbey.”
So he signs a contract with the top-secret Phoenix Corporation, run by a creepy young scientist named Allbright (Matthew Goode). Soon Damian has been run through the remix machine -- it has something to do with magnets -- and emerges with a fresh body and a fresh identity. He is relocated to New Orleans, renamed Edward, and told not to ask questions.
Was Damian’s new chassis cloned from the ground up in a lab, as claimed, or is its provenance more sinister? Why does it come with glitchy memories and some extremely handy black-ops fighting skills? “Self/less” quickly leaves its metaphysical concerns in the dust and becomes a Ryan Reynolds action movie, with nefarious hit men in black cars, pitched gun battles, and the like. Somewhere in here is the talented Natalie Martinez as a woman who thinks she knows who Edward is -- or was -- and a tyke played (engagingly) by Jaynee-Lynne Kinchen. The venerable Victor Garber keeps a straight face as Damian’s oldest friend and the keeper of the story’s more far-fetched twists.
As modern B-movies go, “Self/less” is acceptable fare and more sharply produced than most. You can spend a few hours with it on cable in a few months and no one will get hurt. Scenes in New Orleans give the film some local flavor and the editing by Robert Duffy is agile and inventive enough to catch your attention -- normally a sin but a welcome diversion in this context. The director is the baroque visual stylist Tarsem Singh (“The Cell,” “The Fall”), here hiding his gonzo light beneath a mainstream bushel.
The biggest disappointment in “Self/less” is that Reynolds -- these days a lightly likeable but not particularly memorable leading man -- doesn’t even try to suggest the abrasively charming personality established by Kingsley in the opening scenes. (Even the accent doesn’t make it across the pseudo-scientific divide.) The filmmakers assume we’d prefer to see a great character actor cede ground to a flavorless young movie star. Little do they know we’d rather have it the other way around.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @tyburr.