War Machine — Patrick Hughes [Review]

Sometimes you can tell right away that you’re in for a thoroughly generic bit of junk food, but that’s not always instructive of quality. Often, that lightweight lack of pretension can taste quite good, while at other times you may find yourself simply wondering why you bothered. The latter is the more likely to be the case with most viewers with regard to War Machine, a military/sci-fi thriller that is far from the first (and certainly won’t be the last) of these things to make a movie entirely out of the spare parts of other, far more interesting projects.

Directed by Patrick Hughes, War Machine opens with our hero, a soldier (Reacher’s Alan Ritchson) ,losing his brother (Jai Courtney) during an ambush in Afghanistan. Our guy’s got PTSD all over the place after carrying his bro’s lifeless body back to base. Turns out, his brother wanted to be an Army Ranger, and so now the surviving sibling enlists in Ranger training. The first third of War Machine, then, is devoted to this intense regimen, during which time the soldier receives a number in lieu of a name: 81. In fact almost none of the characters we spend the majority of the film with have names. Call this writer crazy, but… that’s a dumb idea. Anyway, while out on a routine training exercise in a remote, mountainous wilderness, 81 and his unit accidentally wake up a giant alien robot that proceeds to ruthlessly chase everyone, shooting laser beams and lobbing little bombs at them. Suffice it to say, bad news has come for these Rangers.

Now, before digging in any more, it’s worth noting — given that premise — that War Machine is all that bad, per se. The film moves at a decent clip, there’s plenty of competent and legible action, and the robot is designed and rendered nicely. Additionally, Hughes (known best for The Hitman’s Bodyguard duology and The Expendables 3) has proven capable of delivering the kind of what-it-says-on-the-tin action spectacle that executing a script like this requires. But that spectacle seems calculated here to specifically be ignored while you’re on your phone, as virtually every element is lifted from something else and there’s woefully little else to grab onto. There’s a little Full Metal Jacket here, a healthy dose of Predator over there, and, oh hey look, even a dash of War of the Worlds. Since you’ve seen 10 different versions of this Hughes’ film already, it’ll all be quite easy to follow even if you’re barely paying attention — which most viewers will be after none too long.

More specific than just using borrowed parts, War Machine has collected these bits and pieces and smashed them together without attempting to individuate itself at all. For instance, there’s no formal or narrative novelty (think Predator’s truly innovative use of geography and space), and it seemed to have entirely ditched any stab at humor and personality. Even Ritchson, who’s a terrific physical presence with genuine charisma, gets reduced almost entirely to either moping or shouting. And then there’s the climax (partially cribbed from Aliens), which offers a killer-robot-killing procedure so goofy that it renders almost everything that’s preceded it as totally implausible — more implausible. Eventually, this nothingburger isn’t even a tasty distraction. It’s just worthless, warmed-over genre pap.

DIRECTOR: Patrick Hughes;  CAST: Alan Ritchson, Dennis Quaid, Jai Courtney, Esai Morales;  DISTRIBUTOR: Netflix;  STREAMING: March 6;  RUNTIME: 1 hr. 46 min.