Very few actors elevate low-budget action cinema like Milla Jovovich, who is front and center in all of the marketing of Brad Anderson’s latest genre endeavor, Worldbreaker. Her face is even nice and big on the poster. Sadly, the marketing is dishonest: Jovovich has little more than an extended cameo in the dystopian horror-action film. The marketing department can’t be blamed, however, because, well… there is very little in Worldbreaker worth advertising.
A lifeless montage of AI-looking stock footage and expository narration sets up the world: monsters, called “breakers,” emerge from cracks in the ground, and a group of women warriors, in a strange conglomeration of medieval armor and modern weaponry, stand between humanity’s survival and extinction. The breaker’s bites infect people like zombies, except men are affected at a much more dangerous rate than women. Jovovich is one of those warriors, as expected, and must leave her husband (Luke Evans) to care for their daughter, Willa (Billie Boullet), alone. (The parents are so dryly written that they don’t even get names beyond Willa’s mom and dad.) They flee to an island temporarily free from the breakers and pass their time running drills in preparation for an attack.
Willa’s father tells her stories about a mythical man named the Kodiak, supposedly the first person to kill a breaker. He found out that only a good beheading will do the trick, and that somehow makes him important. As he parrots the tales, he insists the story is powerful; it needs to be preserved, not unlike the Bible in the Hughes brothers’ The Book of Eli. But it’s all ultimately a lifeless tale without theme or dramaturgy. Perhaps Willa’s father missed the part about important stories also being good ones because the stories we hear of the Kodiak are about as inspirational as the posters in corporate HR that say “Achieve!” in a fat font situated over some mountain in Chile or Nepal.
As for the creatures, they are familiar regurgitations from the realms of horror and science fiction — though their mischievous laugh before they pounce is easily the most creative design element in the film. Overall, the breakers look most like the lanky killers in A Quiet Place, in part because of their spider-like movement and ghastly faces, which are a hair smoother and more humanish than usual, which is admittedly startling at first. But the humanistic similarities don’t go anywhere interesting. It does, however, lead to a potentially interesting question: if we share a planet, do we also share ancestry? Sadly, this likewise doesn’t seem to matter to writer Joshua Rollins or director Brad Anderson, as the whole origin of the breakers (or the “stitch” they come from) remains wholly unquestioned from a thematic perspective. And the new gender rules — where the men are infected easily, and the women are not — are only used as a narrative excuse to remove Jovovich from the story. That’s some puzzling decision-making, even for a film as devoid of curiosity as Worldbreaker.
Speaking of, though, the genre stalwart does return in the end for one last cameo. Jovovich and a small army of warriors show up on boats just in the nick of time to save the day in the concluding scene, but right as Worldbreaker looks like it might entertain for a moment with a big internecine clash between the two earthly lifeforms, the film ends and leaves all violence to the imagination. Budgetary limitations probably shortened the plays available, but it’s also just bad planning to end a film by teasing a scene whose mere potential is more galvanizing than the entirety of the film that preceded it.
DIRECTOR: Brad Anderson; CAST: Luke Evans, Milla Jovovich, Billie Boullet, Mila Harris; DISTRIBUTOR: Aura Entertainment; IN THEATERS: January 30; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 34 min.
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