I’m continuously amazed that any movie studio trusts Vin Diesel – someone who speaks every line as if he’s gargling rocks and always appears to be holding in a massive fart – to carry a film, much less a franchise. And yet, despite his complete lack of charisma (Groot and The Iron Giant are obvious exceptions for obvious reasons), here we have Bloodshot, an action-packed comic book movie coming out after the genre has already peaked and seems to be on its way out.
Diesel stars as Ray Garrison, a U.S. Marine who lives the life that every 13 year-old Call of Duty gamer dreams of. Ray carries out missions around the world and then immediately gets to come home (I don’t believe that’s how it works) to his beautiful wife, Gina (Talulah Riley), in scenic Italy. “I always come home,” Ray growls as the two make love after he successfully rescues a hostage. Yes, life is perfect, until a man named Martin Axe (the wonderful Toby Kebbell) kidnaps the happy couple and demands information.
Martin holds the two captive in a meat locker, where – in one of the only scenes where the film teases an element of fun – he dances around wearing nothing besides a puffy white coat, high socks with sandals, and a beanie. When Ray can’t give Martin the info he wants, he murders Gina in front of him. Ray barely reacts apart from looking mildly frustrated, and then gets a bullet in his head. Luckily, he gets resurrected by a team of scientists in a secret facility, who fill his body with nanobots that turn him into an enhanced being.
Ray is now a seemingly unstoppable killing machine. The nanites, as they’re called, give him super strength and stamina, and heal any wounds almost instantaneously. They also allow him to access the internet and databases in his head, letting him act as a supercomputer. This is arguably his best and most interesting power, but he doesn’t use it for anything besides finding people, and his first target is the man who killed his wife. But as things progress, Ray learns that many secrets are being kept from him, and he may not be able to fully trust his own memories.
There are some interesting story beats present in Bloodshot, and I assume the best ones come from the source material. The film flips the script halfway through and turns itself into a matter of what’s real and who can be trusted. There also appears to some subtext regarding soldiers being considered disposable. “He’s a dead soldier, America makes new ones everyday!” the head scientist played by Guy Pearce states. Unfortunately, whatever commentary the movie is going for gets drowned out in the explosions and gunfire.
Bloodshot isn’t an entirely unenjoyable film, but it suffers from several glaring issues. The editing is atrocious: scenes aren’t given more than a couple of seconds to breathe, and everything from action moments to exposition flies by before you ever have a chance to process them. The action is difficult to follow with the amount of cuts happening, and a startlingly large amount of dialogue is delivered offscreen. But Bloodshot’s biggest problem is the superhero himself.
Ray is never given any real sort of personality. We never learn a single tangible thing about the man we’re supposed to be rooting for, and Diesel simply isn’t up to the task of adding anything to the character to make us like him. For the most part, Ray just stumbles around killing people and mumbling about how he’s not sure what he should be doing. The climactic battle between him and two other enhanced soldiers means nothing to us because Ray barely has any sort of relationship to the two of them. A pair of other characters, KT (Eliza González) and Wilfred Wigans (Lamorne Morris), consistently outshine him and only make you wish the film had been about them.
For fans of the original comic books, I feel for you. You surely deserve better. Bloodshot isn’t nearly as fun or vibrant as Marvel films (one of its only jokes is about a guy having a small penis), nor does it have the style of DC films. It’s in a strange sort of limbo; certainly not among the worst comic books films, but also not nearly good enough to warrant checking out.
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