It’s sometime in the future and human beings have decided that the best way to keep safe is by staying at home strapped to machines and sending out their robots into the real world, to not only keep their streets and borders safe but also to do everyday things like run parlours, cook, work in offices, earn the daily bread. These robots, called “surrogates”, look exactly like real beings, but of course are younger and better than their owners or “operators”.

One day somebody starts killing these surrogates and their operators, starting with the son of the man who came up with the concept. Willis as FBI Agent Greer first operates through his surrogate to try solving the case, and then is forced to come out in his real form.

The problem with Surrogates isn’t really the plot or its pacing, which is interesting enough. But the whole premise. Greer and his wife (Pike), for example, live in the same house but the only time they meet is as their surrogates, for the latter won’t leave the room where she is strapped to her machine.

On the one side are the “good guys” trying to maintain the order of things as they have come to be — of feeling neither the thrill of gaining anything, nor the pain of losing it. And on the other are the “bad guys” trying to restore the world to “flesh and bone human beings”. Whom would you cheer for?

The motto of VSI — the company that invented surrogates and retails them through corner shops — is “Life… only better”. But isn’t it Bruce Willis who said: “Die Hard”?