Been that way for a while and I missed it?

If Deckard is a replicant, you think they’d give him some of the advantages of the combat models – given he is meant to be hunting them, after all. At least give him upgraded smarts, like Roy, if nothing obvious like Roy or Leon’s strength.

Him doing a terrible job and barely succeeding is a big part of making Blade Runner what it is. If he was a brilliant detective and found and killed everyone easily, the movie would no longer be one of the best ever.

I’m dumber than he is.

Of course, because of who he is, they react violently. This plays into the propaganda that they’re mindless killers, or at least gets his blood up long enough for him to do his job. He coasts along in this way until he meets Rachel. Because she doesn’t know what she is, she doesn’t attack him, and his doubts finally have an opportunity to really take root. The rest of the film is him barely doing his job at all, because he’s slowly realizing that he’s just a murderer for hire.

As you can guess from the description, an incredibly good straight up Noir film.

(No joke. It is good.)

Deckard’s given all the information he needs on a plate, nothing bad happens unexpectedly, and every lead just falls into his lap. He has photo ID of everyone he has to kill, he’s told about their physical strength, they’re all unarmed, and he’s legally allowed to shoot them dead in public. Yet in every case, he lets them get into a hand-to-hand fight with him that he can’t win, and has to wait for someone – or their own random stupidity – to save him.

Brendan in Brick is incredibly smart – I struggle to follow all of his thinking as he figures out the plot. He gets into fights knowing that even though he’s no good, his determination will let him just keep on getting back up. Doing it for a girl who didn’t love him is about emotional weakness rather than lack of intelligence. He loves her, and she begs for his help.

Man, I really want to see Brick again.

This is why I like Indiana Jones so much. He fails relentlessly. Take Raiders of the Lost Ark, and run through it moment by moment. In the opening of the film, everyone on Indy’s team betrays or abandons him; he sets off the traps when trying to clevely remove the idol from the temple; and he barely escapes with his life before being immediately forced to hand the idol over to his arch rival.

He then goes off on a quest to find the Ark. He meets Marion, who slaps him and successfully lies to him about the object he’s looking for. The second Indy leaves, the Nazis turn up and steal it. The eventual conclusion of the film is: Indy and Marion are captured, tied up, and the Nazis succeed in retrieving the Ark. Indy’s only saved by his eyelids.

This kind of failure is my favourite quality in movie characters. There’s a great article about this somewhere, or at least a TV Trope page, but I can’t find either.

See also: Brick. Brendan is a little cleverer than Indy or, by the sounds of it, Deckard. But the girl he’s doing everything for rejected him, is dead, and he spends much of the film getting beaten up. He fights Tug and progresses in his investigation not by winning, but by continually getting up.

The screenwriter originally had some lines in the script comparing Deckard and Roy Batty, pointing out that Deckard is as much a machine as the replicants, following his “programming” like a good little robot. When Batty catches Deckard as he falls from the roof, he even yells “Kinship!”

But in the script, this was all meant to be metaphorical. When Ridley Scott saw the references, however, he took them as literal and decided Deckard was a replicant, hence the glowing eyes and unicorns.

(That’s assuming they killed the eye man. People generally kill people they quote Milton at, I’ve found. Poetry lovers. They’re murdering sorts.)

Okay, fine. A proper police force could get it sorted much more easily (and that’s even without CCTV and facial recognition). But then again, a proper evil geneticist would take the Jurassic Park solution to engineering a slave race and have them with traceable dietary requirements. And come to think of it, a properly trained, murdering assassin type wouldn’t leave a body at a crime scene to be traced back to the place he’s staying at.

I suppose I’m arguing that within the limited stylistic confines of the narrative, Deckard’s… alright. Clever-ish.

@ Joel
Yeah, in one of the Director’s Cuts it’s hinted at. By a unicorn. In a dream. Never made much sense to me, though, so I tend to ignore it and hope it goes away.

Off topic: Just seeing those stills brings the movie back to life. What a visual feast.

Apropos: I was hoping you were going to mention Blade Runner in relation to Inception. I can’t quite pin down why, but the movie Inception reminds me most strongly of is Blade Runner. The ambiguous ending probably doesn’t help, but I think it’s something more abstract than that.

Even Gladiator?

I thought Deckard was a replicant though? At least in one of the fucking 721 endings they made.

Director’s edition, Studio’s edition, Editor’s edition, Limited edition, Theatric edition, HD edition, Producer’s edition, etc etc

But I must point out Ridley Scott is a self centred ass. Every single movie he makes is filled with stupid fake hollywood rain, smoke fucking EVERYWHERE, and slow turning fans in every background.