Bloodshot (2020) Review

Rating: 3 Stars

The following review contains spoilers.

Overview:

When heroic soldier Ray “Blood” Schott is badly wounded while saving a child from foreign terrorists, his only hope is a blood transfusion from his best friend, a military drone. The procedure works… all too well. Now Ray can think the Internet and his body is filled to the brim with mechanical fleas. But when he finds out his handlers have been aiming his giant guns at the wrong people, Ray has to team up with his best friend, a girl who can’t breathe, and his best friend, a Cockney computer hacker with a heart of gold, in a desperate bid to save the actual entire world.

Best Parts:

There’s a great pop culture podcast called The Weekly Planet, and in some of their reviews when one of them is panning a movie, the other one might say, “but I had fun with it though!” as if that were an entire counter-argument. And that’s how I feel about the movie Bloodshot. It is, perhaps, not a great movie, but I had fun with it though.

I like how dumb and cliched it is at the start, and then later they reveal that it’s dumb and cliche because it was all fake memories designed by some not-so-creative people to motivate this guy into going on a mission of revenge. It’s almost like they’re saying, hey these dumb action movie cliches sure do make big beefy meatheads want to go out and kick some ass. The entire premise of the movie is that Bloodshot is better at ass-kicking if he thinks it’s because he’s getting revenge on someone killing his girl. Like if they gave him fake memories of the President being kidnapped or something he wouldn’t do quite as good a job stabbing necks.

Once they reveal that they’ve been replaying this same scenario over and over again, there is some fun business where now we can see the bad guys basically rolling their eyes at Bloodshot behind his back while going through the motions yet again.

I think the scene where he finds his wife alive and slowly realizes she broke up with him years ago and has a new family was effective. I think Vin Diesel occasionally has some good macho-hero-man lines. Some of the action scenes are pretty good, like the weird tunnel fight surrounded by loose flour (an homage to the oil fight from Transporter? discuss), or when the other two augmented soldier guys are chasing Bloodshot through London.

Worst Parts:

And some of the action scenes, like when they’re all fighting on an elevator shaft, look like two weightless cartoon characters tumbling through an imaginary space. And if you think Superman and Wolverine have no stakes, boy does this movie have no stakes. It’s never even super clear what the bad guys are trying to accomplish, and Bloodshot is essentially unkillable. They make a big deal over his weakness being that he needs the nanites in blood to be recharged now and again, and then in the last scene the hacker friend says that he somehow “fixed” that and so now I guess they have limitless energy and Bloodshot is immortal?

I was actually stupid enough to think that this movie about a guy who has been manipulated into getting revenge over and over again would end with him realizing revenge is not the right path, especially when he’s run out of nanite-power and everyone is yelling in his earpiece to stop what he’s doing or he’ll die, and he’s staring at the guy who’s been manipulating him… and then he kills that guy, and he blows up, and there are no consequences whatsoever because he’s magically alive again in the next scene with no real explanation.

The one girl in the main cast might as well introduce herself in the first scene by saying, “Hi, I’m K.T., I’ll be developing a conscience in like 40 minutes so let’s talk more then.” Her whole deal just did not work for me.

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