Netflix may have run out of generic movie titles, now that we’re forced to differentiate War Machine (2026) with War Machine (2017). The latter differentiated itself by being a satire led by Brad Pitt, but today, we have to deal with the former, which struggles to differentiate itself from dozens of similar military/sci-fi action movies. And so we have the Reacher guy (Alan Ritchson) and the director of The Expendables 3 and both Hitman’s Bodyguard flicks (Patrick Hughes) teaming up for a subtle, heartwarming tale of a soldier and a giant alien robot trying to blow each other to smithereens. Good news is, you won’t need a single functioning brain cell to enjoy it.
The Gist: We open in Kandahar, Afghanistan, where a bunch of American soldiers are doing soldier shit. Does anything else ever happen in Kandahar, Afghanistan? Nope, at least not in the movies. Two of those soldiers are brothers and nobody has names – sigh – but they’re played by Jai Courtney and Ritchson, and they do what you absolutely shouldn’t do in a movie’s cold open: make plans. That’s a death sentence. Sure enough, kablooey, and for the rest of the movie Courtney’s rendered an unconscious slab of meat in flashbacks.
TWO YEARS LATER. Ritchson almost has a name now – it’s 81. Nobody has real names in Army Ranger training, probably to protect the feelings of the angry puckerbutt sergeants in charge, who can bark the numbers of failed recruits instead of jettisoning poor brokenhearted Jeff and Sally from the program. Esai Morales and Dennis Quaid play the sergeants, who have real names even though they’re barely in the movie; somewhere, on some planet, but not this one, this might make sense. Anyway, 81 has PTSD and a Silver Star from what happened in Kandahar. He and his broh were gonna become Rangers together, and now he’s paying tribute to his fallen sibling by squishing his feelings down into a tiny dark-matter psycho-nugget and marching through training like he’s made out of iron. He might be valedictorian of this batch of Ranger wannabes if he actually commiserated with his fellow soldiers, but even a leisurely chat about the weather might disrupt his robo-laser focus.
Speaking of robo-lasers. Our guy makes it to the final batch of recruits, who include uncharacters played by Daniel Webber, Stephan James, Alex King, Keiynan Lonsdale and some others. In fact, our guy is the squad leader for their final training exercise, which involves being dropped in a patch of Colorado woods with fake guns and fake bullets for a fake mission that involves blowing up a crashed airplane. Or something like that. Doesn’t matter. Before we move on, did anyone pay heed to the news reports playing in the background of earlier scenes, blabbity-blabbing something about an asteroid circling Earth? How could you not? The movie goes out of its damn way to make us suspicious of such reports, because this isn’t the type of movie that just throws in superfluous details to give the story a little color.
Well, that “asteroid” might have something to do with the strange craft our guy and his nameless almost-Rangers come across and try to blow up, only to see it transform into a towering kaijubot armed with lasers, grenades and cold hard mercilessness. I mean, these poor people get their guts blown out and limbs blown off and heads blown away – but not 81. He survives, because squaring off against a Transformator from outer space is the best way to manage PTSD, and that’s a true scientific medical fact.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Well, we have some direct inspiration from Aliens, Predator and Transformers, and indirect influence from Independence Day, War of the Worlds, Starship Troopers, Full Metal Jacket and about 300 military-guy movies starring Mark Wahlberg.
Performance Worth Watching: Is Ritchson The Guy yet? Not at this juncture – the forgettable War Machine doesn’t give him much to do beyond limp, bleed, mope and kick ass, which isn’t enough to elevate him to modern-Schwarzenegger status.
Our Take: Remember how the Iron Giant famously insisted, “I AM NOT A GUN”? Well, this one’s a gun. They don’t name movies War Machine without reason, you know. Unless they’re being ironic, but that’s a level of semi-literary ambition in which this movie shows no interest. Hughes and James Beaufort’s screenplay is so stripped-down it makes a skeleton look like the Sta-Puft Marshmallow Man. Its main character is a stereotypical sad loner with an inner life confined wholly to about six overcooked slo-mo melodramatic flashbacks and a tattoo he and his broh had that says DFQ, as in Don’t F—ing Quit. And the movie is about how he Don’t F—ing Quit. That’s it.
I have questions, though. War Machine exists under the age-old assumption that any outer space entities visiting this planet are here for a human massacre. No diplomacy. One assumes the aliens did their research and determined that, among all the life on Earth, humans are most capable of fighting back, which therefore stops the attackers from killing lions and whales and bacteria and eels and dung beetles and koalas and geese and everything. Why they’re dead-set on mass murder is unexplained; at least the xenomorphs in the Aliens movies inspire in us deep thoughts about the life cycles of parasites, even if they never get into why the creatures sometimes just indiscriminately kill everything in sight. It’s just scarier that way, I guess.
We’re willing to forgive the xenomorphs their lack of motivational consistency because they look cool as hell and do cool as hell things even when some of the movies they’re in are lousy. At least the Predator predators, which also look cool as hell, and sometimes populate lousy movies, are framed as big-game trophy hunters. But the war machine in War Machine is ugly and dumb, a Robotech design reject with no visual personality or nifty weaponry. It’s a spaceship with Pacific Rim-robot legs that blasts lasers and spits out grenades. The film’s perspective remains on the ground with our meatbag protag, so we have no inkling if there’s a little creature inside the bot or up in a UFO remotely controlling it, or if it’s AI gone genocidal. It exists solely as a cog in a plot interested in running our hero through a gauntlet that’ll hopefully make him less depressed.
Craft-wise, Hughes shows not-unremarkable ability to stage and execute some intense, Xbox-coded action sequences in which the Rangers scale cliffs, cross raging rivers and rev up an abandoned tank under the threat of laser-and-grenade barrages. But pointing that out feels like the application of Turtle Wax-brand turd polish. Everything else is a cliche: Seemingly dozens of shots of soon-to-be-dead people standing agape, hypnotized by the sight of a massive alien machine aiming its sights at their skulls. Or the cornball parallels between 81’s flashbacks and his current reality. Or the dialogue of the Army sergeants, whose exhortations of “You are officially one crazy motherf—er!” and “That finish line is a starting line!” are all just so much gnawing on stale beef jerky.
By the time we get to the big yawnworthy climactic showdown when Ritchson bellows “You wanna piece of me?!?” as Hughes wholesale rips off the climax of Aliens, our emotional investment in War Machine has been worn down to raw lumber. Its weird blend of authentic military drama and ridiculous sci-fi never transcends the norm, and the movie offers zero surprises whatsoever. It does leave the door open for a sequel, lord help us all.
Our Call: Bore Machine. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.
