Directed by Patrick Hughes | Written by Hughes and James Beaufort | 106 min | ▲▲1/2 | Netflix
Alan Ritchson is making some interesting decisions with his career. Reacher on Prime made him a star, and he knows his massive frame lends itself to action cinema — he’s learned lessons from Schwarzenegger. Consider his supporting role in ensemble pieces Fast X and The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. Coming soon is the violent genre experiment Motor City, an action comedy with Kevin James, Playdate, and now this — a Netflix sci-fi actioner that’s part military bootcamp, part alien invasion picture.
Ritchson’s an unnamed Staff Sergeant in Afghanistan serving with his brother (Jai Courtney, we hardly knew ya) who dies in the first five minutes in a Taliban attack. Ritchson and bro both had DFQ tattooed on their arms — which stands for Don’t Fucking Quit — so the remaining brother in arms signs up to train for an elite ranger regiment, even though he’s both old and traumatized in the face of the other bootcamp recruits, not to mention his bad knee suffered in the attack. These elite soldiers are all given numbers — I guess part of the dehumanizing process in order to be better at killing? — and so our man becomes known as 81.
Joining him in training are a number of fresh faces, most of whom have no personalities. That doesn’t include Stephan James as 7, who is at least empathetic, with Dennis Quaid and Esai Morales as the hard men in charge. Eventually the ones who make it through the brutal tests are given a final wargame exercise. Just their luck an asteroid deposits the titular war machine, a giant alien version of ED-209 from Robocop, right in the middle of their final exam.
So, what we have here is a massively derivative actioner — Predator, as well as Jim Cameron’s Aliens and Terminator movies are referenced, even on the soundtrack — combined with a big, stupid rah-rah American military recruitment circle-jerk. But, if you can handle all of that, it’s also pretty satisfying, dumb-as-a-bag-of-hammers escapist entertainment. Hughes proves to be a capable action filmmaker, orchestrating an impressive central set-piece on a raging river with A+ stunts while keeping the action going at a clip where we only stop long enough for 81 to finally get a little weepy over his brother’s death while trying to save the green recruits.
The picture’s biggest liability to logic is the alien machine. Its mech-tech armaments seem entirely terrestrial and its movement ridiculous, borderline laughable whenever it shows up. But Ritchson and his many cannon-fodder colleagues acquit themselves well against this foe, setting up a franchise should undemanding Netflix subscribers will it.
