Alan Ritchson can’t be blamed for parlaying his success on television’s Reacher into a bigger career, but he needs to be more selective.
Surely he can do better than director Patrick Hughes’ laughably ludicrous, hyper-violent sci-fi cartoon.
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| With an unstoppable, massive killing machine pursuing rapidly, Staff Sergeant 81 (Alan Ritchson) does his best to save himself and his badly injured companion (Stephan James) |
That conversation doesn’t get far; the Americans are hit by Taliban insurgents, and everybody is killed except the Staff Sergeant.
Two years pass. The Staff Sergeant is among a large cluster of hopeful recruits who enter the Ranger Assessment Selection Program, at a Colorado training base supervised by Sergeant Major Sheridan (Dennis Quaid) and First Sergeant Torres (Esai Morales). Everybody is assigned a number, by which we know them from this point forward; the Staff Sergeant becomes 81.
He carries baggage, both physical — a lingering knee injury, inflicted during the Taliban strike — and mental. He’s withdrawn, and refuses to socialize with the others (perfect for Ritchson’s signature bottled-up emotions). He also suffers from PTSD nightmares, blaming himself for having failed to save his brother.
Some of 81’s fellow trainees stand out, starting with 7 (Stephan James), sensitive to this big guy’s issues, but with a perceptive gaze that suggests he knows something of the man’s past. 15 (Blake Richardson) is a wisecracking smart-mouth; 44 (Alex King) is a plucky young woman who keeps up with the guys.
That’s about it, in terms of development; Hughes and Beaufort don’t care enough to give any of these characters a back-story, or even much of a personality.
The training sessions are punishing, with Ritchson’s driven 81 often outdoing everybody else. But Sheridan and Torres worry about his mental state, and his refusal to accept a command position. As a “last chance,” they make him team leader during the final “death march” exercise: a simulated mission in the nearby mountainous forest.
Meanwhile, ongoing radio reports have described an asteroid-like object approaching Earth, then orbiting and breaking off into pieces.
81 and his assault team are dropped by helicopter onto their starting position. Their mission: to destroy a downed classified aircraft and rescue its captured pilot, held elsewhere in an improvised “enemy camp.”
They soon come across a massive downed something ... at which point this film goes off the rails. Any idiot would know immediately that this highly unusual whatzis isn’t any sort of American plane. The team nonetheless plants explosive charges on it, sets them off; everybody reacts with shock when the whatzis suffers no damage.
Indeed, all they did was wake it up.
It unfolds, expands upon two massive legs, sends out blue and red scans, and massacres most of the squad with a combination of lethal heat rays and spherical airborne bombs. Hughes gleefully fills the screen with shredded bodies, decapitations, severed limbs and all manner of gory viscera.
In the aftermath, only 81, 7, 15, 44 and a few others are left alive, to be hunted by this huge, hulking “war machine” that wants them all dead.
After noticing an impact trail from a distant mountainside to the valley in which they’re trying to stay alive, 81 deduces that this thing is extraterrestrial. (Gee ... ya think?)
It’s never revealed whether this is some sort of giant autonomous robot, or under the control of some being inside.
Alas, this is where the visual effects department destroys any semblance of verisimilitude. Although the sound effects team does a great job granting size to the war machine, it never feels like an organic part of the real world environment. It doesn’t interact properly with the terrain, and it’s too frequently obvious that Ritchson and his costars are “acting” against empty space.
The result is as phony as rear-projection used to be, in the old days, when (for example) film characters drove a car.
Credit where due, Ritchson, James and the others — along with a terrific stunt team — put heart and soul into the pell-mell physical action. Here again, though, it becomes increasingly impossible to believe that their frail, meat-bag forms would survive the carnage endured during the film’s second half, particularly a pell-mell chase along the valley floor.
Hughes doesn’t merely stretch credibility; he breaks it entirely.
Worse yet, the blatantly open-ended climax is something of a cliff-hanger that suggests all involved hoped for a sequel ... which, according to publicity, already has been guaranteed.
I can hardly wait...
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