Rating: C-
Dir: Patrick Hughes.
Star: Alan Ritchson, Dennis Quaid, Stephan James, Jai Courtney.
It is always with a sense of dread that I press play on another Netflix presentation… and…
…BIG MUSIC BIG EMOTIONS BIGLY SHOUTING – JOIN THE RANGERS – RANGERS LEAD THE WAY – ALL THE WAY – YEE-HAW… …all whilst NASA quietly assures us that ‘…there is no cause for alarm…’ from an asteroid that, uhmmm, seems to behaving oddly, and is, erm, getting closer…. and breaking apart…. erm… nope… definitely nothing to see here, move along please.
As we meet a man, mourning the loss of his brother by honouring their last promise to join the Rangers. Cue a montage of ‘brutal training’ type of stuff that you have already seen countless times, with, erm, our man always leading the way. Ignoring a few hiccups, the whittled-down squad arrives at the final stage of U.S. Army Ranger selection, whereupon the passing-out exercise for this nascent squad turns into a fight for survival against an interestingly inaccurate and selectively capable threat. Although, in fairness, they did awaken the Kill-Bot-2000 by detonating quite a lot of C4 on the poor things noggin, so it does have some reason to be a bit miffed as well as slightly dazed.
Now, one interesting aspect to my notes is that at no point did I write down a single character’s name (nor number), not even the one played by Dennis Quaid for nearly ninety seconds of screen time – for which he gets second billing – ‘interestingly’. And. I’m already bored writing anything more about this derivative, unimaginative tripe. So. It’s summary time.
This is a well shot, quite impressive, highly kinetic, shouty-boomy bombastic action movie, that overall is actually quite well done and one that does just enough to hold your attention. It is however, also, neither engaging nor exciting and overall, well, it’s not bad, it’s just not any good.
The whole thing left me feeling that this is the sort of film that an AI would produce – a pulling together of everything you’ve ever seen before, whilst adding nothing new, to finally apply a sprinkling of soullessness on top.