Bloodshot 2020 Movie Reviews & Film Trailer Release

It’s fair to say that Vin Diesel hasn’t managed to successfully expand his “brand” outside of the bread-and-butter familiarity of both The Fast and the Furious and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, though certainly not for lack of trying over the years.

Franchise-ready duds like Babylon A.D. and The Last Witch Hunter in particular indicate the actor’s keen interest in the sci-fi and fantasy genres, yet it doesn’t appear to be a mode that audiences (or critics) seem much keen to accept him in – in live-action form, at least.

And now, we can add Bloodshot to the pile, a slushy comic book adaptation that couldn’t feel more directly tethered to the beginnings of Diesel’s blockbuster career. For better and for worse, this is a shameless early-2000s throwback – though this time around, both of the 52-year-old Diesel’s love interests are roughly two decades his junior (because of course they are).

After Marine Ray Garrison (Vin Diesel) and his wife Gina (Talulah Riley) are murdered by ambiguously-accented gangster Martin Axe (Toby Kebbell), Garrison wakes up to find himself revived via cutting edge nanotechnology, courtesy of Dr. Emil Harting (Guy Pearce). Better still, Garrison is kitted out with a number of nifty upgrades; enhanced strength, regeneration, and even the ability to scan computer databases in seconds. All useful for revenge, then.

It’s hardly a unique premise for the genre, and Bloodshot feels most obviously indebted to movies like The Terminator, The Matrix, and Source Code, no matter that the latter two are predated by the title character’s creation. But a lack of originality doesn’t need to imply a joyless sandbox, especially with The Fast and the Furious‘ Neal H. Moritz co-producing the film with Diesel.

For a clue of what Bloodshot really is, though, you shouldn’t look at Moritz or the Valiant Comics source material, but debuting director Dave Wilson. Having cut his teeth as the helmer of video game cinematics in hit titles such as Mass Effect 2, BioShock Infinite, and The Division, it perhaps shouldn’t be terribly surprising that his movie spends most of its 109-minute runtime resembling a video game.

That needn’t be a negative, though it’s clear that, despite the script’s intermittent inventiveness, this production was stretching its $45 million budget past the point of tenable elasticity. A movie about a man who becomes a near-indestructible superhero naturally requires a ton of expensive VFX, and there’s an infuriating inconsistency to the visuals on offer.

At times it looks passable, even decent, yet in the film’s more high-concept, vertiginous third act battle, it’s howlingly low-fi. That’s not to ignore some hilariously unconvincing location doubling either, with “London” appearing to have been lazily recreated in Cape Town instead; not even the license plates are correct.

The Grudge 2020 Movie Reviews & Film Trailer Release