Joel on Film

A group of military men become trapped in the wilderness with an otherworldly being as lethal as it is precise, and it all comes down to our machismo-driven hero to stop the bloodshed. It’s no secret what movie War Machine is meant to emulate, and if only co-writer/director Patrick Hughes’ film were as genuinely inventive and consistently entertaining as that one, we would be in good shape. There are times, in fact, when the potential for such a movie is quite obvious, and most of them have to do with star Alan Ritchson, who is certainly big and muscular and charismatic enough to carry a project like this one.

Ritchson is quite magnetic here as the type of stoic action hero that doesn’t even carry a name: Much like his compatriots in the military exercise gone wrong, the man only dons a number—“81”—as his moniker, which is basically the best way for his commanding officers in the Army Rangers to distinguish between their soldiers. It’s harder for us to do so, beyond their physical appearance, for the other men in the unit, but that’s fine in principle, as long as the surrounding movie gives them something memorable to do and/or say. Struggling to do just that is the problem that befalls this particular effort.

Before we get to the military exercise, we do learn a little about this character, who loses his brother (played by Jai Courtney in a glorified cameo), who is also in the Army, during an attack that kills everyone except our hero. That’s the predominate reason for his willfully signing up to train in the exact scenarios that led his brother to success, and if you’re wondering, yes, this man will eventually consider his fellow soldiers to be brothers of a different sort. This is all sort of a commercial for the Army Rangers, and it’s also an odd one, considering what happens over the course of the story.

Reports of an odd entry into our upper atmosphere, followed by a discreet landing, sends “81” and his fellow recruits out into the wilderness to investigate it, although it’s mostly meant to be a training exercise, with progress reported back to a couple of grizzled commanders (played by Dennis Quaid and Esai Morales, obviously) who will determine who stays and who packs it in. It’s fairly standard stuff as far as plot goes, and the recruits are mostly played by a number of actors who must know they’re here to be robot chow. The most significant ones are played by Stephan James, as the introspective “17,” and Blake Richardson, as the neurotic comic-relief “15.”

On the other side of the gun barrels is a massive and efficient robot, slightly clunky in its design but strangely efficient and even, whenever Hughes and co-screenwriter James Beaufort wants it to be, stealthy. It has a heat-guided tracking system, some powerfully explosive projectiles, and a surprise attack that originates from its middle section. In other words, it’s not all that interesting as a bad movie robot, and the initial excitement of the action set pieces quickly wears off when we realize that each scene is going to be a variation on the last one we saw.

There are some clever bits along the way, though, again, they’re almost entirely connected to Ritchson’s performance and the character, whose ability to think quickly on his feet is somehow almost never undermined by the film’s otherwise somewhat wonky internal logic. The actor fully convinces us that the no-nonsense quality is a feature of his psychology, rather than a simple personality quirk, and later, he also is quite good at displaying emotion when it, even for this man who finds concepts like “emotion” to be needless distractions, is the only response to the ensuing carnage. The entire movie is in Ritchson’s hard stare, for better and for worse.

The “for worse” part is that, despite having such a great character at its disposal, War Machine doesn’t really do much with him or the scenario in which he and others are stuck. The proof is in the pudding of a climactic confrontation, in which the method of defeat is so thuddingly easy that it can only come across as an anticlimax, with sadly little of what came before it able to offset the disappointment.

Rating: ** (out of ****)