MOVIE REVIEW – War Machine never pretends to be smarter, deeper, or more refined than it is: this is a loud, broad-shouldered sci-fi action movie built out of plasma fire, military grit, and an unreasonable amount of muscle. Patrick Hughes’ film often plays like some relic from the VHS era that has been rebuilt with modern CGI and Alan Ritchson’s sheer physical presence. It is not subtle, it is not sophisticated, and its script is hardly the sharpest weapon in the rack, but it charges ahead with enough momentum and shameless confidence to make a case for itself anyway. We watched War Machine on Netflix in Hungary.

A group of U.S. Army Ranger recruits head into what is supposed to be the last field exercise of their training, only to discover that their final exam has somehow turned into first contact with the advance guard of an alien invasion. Netflix, incidentally, already has a War Machine, namely David Michôd’s 2017 satirical comedy about the absurd machinery of war. This newer film carrying the same title does not comment on the madness of warfare so much as embody it outright – sometimes to its benefit, sometimes by accident. Alan Ritchson’s character is known simply as 81, a future Ranger identified by a number rather than a name, a man who joins the elite infantry in honor of his dead brother, while Jai Courtney appears in the prologue only to disappear from the picture so quickly he barely has time to register. Once enlisted, 81 is put through every humiliation and punishment the military can throw at him, all for one very clear purpose: to hammer home just how absurdly tough this numbered protagonist is.

When boot camp runs into the wrong planet

He is sullen, withdrawn, visibly boiling under the weight of PTSD, the kind of man who sprints uphill while everyone else is still jogging, crushes rivals with his bare hands, and nearly drowns himself at the bottom of a pool just to prove that breathing is apparently for the weak. None of this is delivered with even a hint of restraint, and if anyone in the audience somehow misses the point, the giant DFQ tattoo on his forearm is there to spell it out: Don’t fucking quit! The opening stretch mostly moves through familiar training-camp territory, but it also keeps one eye on TV reports about a mysterious space rock set to pass dangerously close to Earth – call it Chekhov’s asteroid if you like. That detail suddenly becomes a lot more important when the recruits are sent out for their final field test and come face to face with a towering bipedal alien death machine that seems interested in one thing only: wiping them off the map.

Why this extraterrestrial terminator is so determined to hunt down a handful of unarmed trainee soldiers is never meaningfully addressed, but to its credit the film does not waste time pretending it has a coherent theory of alien invasion strategy. After the initial massacre, the hulking machine – which looks like some unholy hybrid of ED-209 and Megatron – keeps chasing the fleeing recruits across hills and rough terrain, turning the pursuit into a string of surprisingly persuasive, CGI-heavy bursts of destruction.

In the shadow of Predator, at full volume

Patrick Hughes, who also co-wrote the script with James Beaufort, is best known for The Expendables 3, The Hitman’s Bodyguard, and Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard, and he throws himself at the action here with the same all-in energy, while wearing his affection for Predator very openly. This does not come remotely close to matching the tension or craftsmanship of John McTiernan’s gloriously thick-necked classic, but as an ’80s-flavored throwback it still serves up a perfectly acceptable helping of big, dumb fun while the unstoppable intruder stomps its way through the cast on the road to the inevitable man-versus-machine showdown. There is not much character work to speak of, 81 is basically Jack Reacher with a busted knee, most of the squad exists largely to be vaporized, and the dialogue often sounds even stiffer than the alien hardware itself.

What War Machine loses in finesse, though, it makes up for with sheer eagerness, piling up enjoyable set pieces such as a hillside slaughter, a dangerous river crossing, and a panicked APC chase that are easy to get swept up in. And as Ritchson has already proved over three seasons of Reacher, there is something fundamentally satisfying about watching a man who appears to be made up of roughly eighty percent bicep smashing everything in his path with escalating force.

Ridiculous, deafening, and oddly hard to dislike

So yes, this is a deeply stupid film, but it is also undeniably entertaining, and it pays open, unapologetic tribute to the kind of straight-to-video sci-fi titles that used to crowd the shelves at Blockbuster, only now with a healthier budget and a similarly oversized leading man. If you are scrolling through the algorithm on a Friday night and the idea of a Jack Reacher-shaped slab of muscle yelling Thermodynamics, motherfucker! at a giant alien murder-robot sounds like exactly the kind of nonsense you are in the mood for, then War Machine can absolutely carry the evening. This is a brainless, bombastic, explosion-happy action movie that feels absurd on almost every level, and it ends up being far more fun than you might reasonably expect.

-Gergely Herpai “BadSector”-