This film has exactly one twist, which the trailer spoils and is handled poorly in the film itself anyway: after special ops soldier Ray Garrison (Vin Diesel) is brutally murdered by a terrorist for extremely flimsy reasons, he wakes up with no memory but a bunch of generic nano-technology powered abilities like super-strength and rapid healing.
No sooner has Dr Emil Harting (Guy Pearce) explained the set-up than Garrison remembers who killed him - and that first he watched his wife (Talulah Riley) die (by a cattle bolt gun no less). Enraged, he races off, uses his new nanite abilities to instantly locate the terrorist, and gets into a moderately cool battle with the bad guy's hired goons before finishing the job. So the movie's over? Not quite.
The basic set-up - dead soldier brought back to life with false memories implanted so he'll kill who he's told and think it's all his idea - was stale when Bloodshot the comic ripped it off from Frank Miller and Geof Darrow's (far crazier) comic Hard Boiled, which itself was using a bunch of ideas left over from when Miller was writing the Robocop sequels. Also: Wolverine. And Universal Soldier, come to think of it.
So original this is not; unfortunately, it doesn't do much of anything interesting with the conceit of a killer who can't trust his memories, tossing aside the idea of his constantly reliving the same moments as soon as possible and not bothering to play with the idea that "the real world" could also be based on fiction. We never even find out whether the story of his death is real - though that may just be leaving the door open for a sequel that seems increasingly unlikely to come.
Harting's squad of tech-augmented semi-super-soldiers are sketched in broad but effective strokes, with morally tortured swimmer KT (Elza Gonzalez) the sidekick in waiting while the others at least get interesting techno-abilities (robot limbs, artificial eyes). They also seem more entertainingly plausible than Garrison, who's just a stocky middle-aged man whose chest glows red if you shoot him too much.
Fortunately his job here is largely to stomp around while people shoot at him, and there's the occasional effective moment here and there where his ability to constantly regenerate creates some interesting visuals. The action is what you're here for and it's the strongest part of the film, which is to say it's the only part of the film that uses Vin Diesel well.
The trouble with pretty much every Vin Diesel movie that doesn't have Fast & Furious in the title is that if you're not extremely careful everyone else in the movie can seem more interesting than him. That's definitely the case here, and even though he's actually meant to be a brick-like unstoppable force that the rest of the plot turns on, every single person in every single scene is still more charismatic than he is, including some of the generic goons he uses as human shields.
Still, at least nobody calls him "Bloodshot".
- Anthony Morris
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