Director – Dave Wilson (Love, Death & Robots)
Starring – Vin Diesel (Guardians of the Galaxy, The Last Witch Hunter), Eiza Gonzalez (From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series, Godzilla vs. King Kong), and Sam Heughan (The Spy Who Dumped Me, Outlander)
Release Date – 2020
Rating – 2.5/5
Tagline – “You don’t need a past to have a future”
Covid-19 changed things for a lot of people. I’m a married man with a family so it’s rare that I get to visit a theatre to watch some movies but I had plans to check out two different films while they were on their theatrical run. The first was The Hunt which has since been released on VOD for the time being. The other film was the Vin Diesel vehicle Bloodshot. The trailer looked like a fun popcorn action flick. I had never read the comics so I was only excited to see the film. A friend of mine picked the film up recently on 4K and was kind enough to send me the Vudu code to use.
**Spoiler Alert** The film follows special ops soldier Ray (Diesel) who is killed when he is captured by a terrorist. The terrorist kills his wife and soon Ray is awakened in a lab where he learns he was brought back to life with nanobots that instantly heal him. Armed with a vendetta against the person responsible for his death and the love of his life, he sets out to kill him. However, there is more at play here than he is lead to believe and soon uncovers that the person responsible for his rebirth has more sinister plans for him. **Spoiler Alert**
I wasn’t expecting a movie that I would obsess over but I was expecting a fun theatrical action flick that would be fun to watch despite it’s flaw. Sadly, Bloodshot failed. It did have a few cool moments but the dreadful dialogue and melodramatic characters made this one a but boring.
The acting in this one is what you would expect from a film starring Vin Diesel. In every movie I’ve seen of his he always acts like the same character. The Last Witch Hunter is a favorite of mine but if you cut his scenes out and put them in The Fast and the Furious you wouldn’t be able to pick the characters apart. The same can be said about Bloodshot. His character has no personality so it’s difficult to follow him throughout the film. The supporting cast delivers some very fun performances with way more entertaining characters than Ray (Bloodshot).
The story for this one is painfully predictable with most of the story given away in the trailer. You literally go into this knowing who the antagonist is. The only thing you don’t know from the trailer is why. The characters are very cliched and some are so cliched they come across as cringy. We have one character that is a master at swimming that has…cybernetic lungs. A sharpshooter that lost his vision that has been fit with implants making him see better than before. I mean, come on. This is G.I. Joe type stuff. I surely hope these are characters found in the comics and not people written into the film.
Finally, the film has some pretty cool scenes with some blood and gruesome images. The film relies heavily on computer generated images but it works for the film. I’ve seen CGI in movies like this in the past and they were atrocious. However, Bloodshot uses it very well to fit the film. In fact, a few of the scenes, mostly highlighted in the trailer, really impressed me. Overall, Bloodshot is a painfully mediocre but does have a few memorable moments. It’s fun for a one time watch but you will find yourself tuning out.
