PLOT- Ray Garrison, a slain soldier, is re-animated with superpowers.
REVIEW- If you want to walk into director Dave Wilson’s sci-fi actioner as blindly as I did, exit this review now. If you desire a hint of what you’re in for, let me leave you with a few phrases you would have encountered had you stuck around: “Universal Soldier,” “robotic cucarachas,” “needle drop abuse of the Talking Heads” and “blatant rip-off.”
Even though “Bloodshot” is an adaptation of a comic book (unread by me), screenwriters Jeff Wadlow and Eric Heisserer take their cues and their plot details from a slew of far better movies in this genre. Films like “Terminator 2: Judgment Day,” “Robocop” and “Total Recall” are thrown into a blender, and the diluted, flavourless results leave you longing for the original ingredients. The most noticeable influence is “Universal Soldier,” a film that shares so many plot elements that “Bloodshot” can be classified as a blatant rip-off. That movie spawned three sequels; I can only hope “Bloodshot” ‘s bloodline ends here.
Adding insult to injury, the screenwriters do that self-defensive meta thing that drives me up the damn wall, where they have characters acknowledge “hey, we’re ripping this particular movie off” and “hee-hee-hee! Aren’t these genre tropes that we’re using dumb and tired?” There are such insincerity and passive-aggressive cowardice in this approach; it either invites the audience to feel superior to the material or, worse, acknowledges that the filmmakers know they are peddling an inferior product to the consumer. They think you’re a sucker for buying it. I have more respect for a movie that damns the torpedoes, fully commits to its madness, and goes down in flames than one that intentionally sets itself on fire as a precautionary measure.
