BLOODSHOT: A Shockingly Terrible Start to the Valiant Cinematic Universe

Genre: Action, Drama, Sci-Fi 

Produced by: Neal H. Moritz, Toby Jaffe, Dinesh Shamdasani, Vin Diesel      

Directed by: David S.F. Wilson    

Written by: Jeff Wadlow, Eric Heisserer     

Production Company: Columbia Pictures     

Starring: Vin Diesel, Eiza Gonzalez, Sam Heughan, Toby Kebbell, Lamorne Morris, Talulah Riley, Siddharth Dhananjay, Guy Pearce

Runtime: 109 minutes                 

SYNOPSIS: 

Ray Garrison (Vin Diesel) is an elite marine who is killed in action, only to be revived by the Rising Spirit Tech (RST) Corporation, a company that enhances disabled soldiers beyond the peak human condition through the miracle of nano- technology. He uses his newfound power to take up the mantle of Bloodshot, an indestructible killing machine out for revenge and RST’s greatest weapon in their fight against the city’s rising crimes.  Then he discovers there’s more to his story than meets the eye, where the lines between fantasy and reality begin to blur. 


 

REVIEW: 

The Bloodshot series heralds the arrival of the fledgling comic book company Valiant Comics in the midst of the Marvel/DC hegemony. On the one hand, Valiant boasts a roster of over thousands of characters throughout its three-decade-long history, but on the other, the way the character of Bloodshot is able to steal the show from then-more established Valiant properties such as Eternal Warrior and Rai in 1992 speaks volume about his reputation as the company’s signature character. 

Based on his appearances in those titles and the enthusiastic response from avid Valiant readers, the original creators Kevin VanHook, Don Perlin and Bob Layton came back together a year later for its maiden standalone issue Bloodshot #1, which went on to sell approximately a million copies. Every installment since then has sold over seven million copies in total. That is the sort of numbers that helped prevent Valiant from going under during their financial troubles. Still, though, whereas many of its competitors have made the big jump from page to screen, Valiant seems like the odd one out. The web series Ninjak vs. the Valiant Universe (2018) remained the first Valiant property that has been released to be adapted to the screen, albeit the small one. 

But 2020’s Bloodshot is the first one to be given the theatrical release treatment. And this comic book adaptation comes with a strong pedigree. Action superstar Vin Diesel pulls the double duty of playing the title character while also acting as one of the movie’s four producers. Meanwhile, Hollywood studio Columbia Pictures secured the film rights to the character, who themselves are no stranger to adapting a comic book property to the big screen, having done so successfully for Marvel with the Spider-Man movies. In a world where Hollywood is obsessed with turning every intellectual property into the next big cinematic universe, it’s clear that they are in it for the long haul. Bloodshot is planned to be the first installment in the aptly-titled Valiant Cinematic Universe. 

And yet, what transpires is a loud, lame and excruciating slog of a comic book movie. Bloodshot is a soulless and derivative undertaking, where its major misstep as a franchise starter echoes the same made-by-committee mentality that had seemingly put the final nail far too early in the coffins of many studio’s previous efforts at shoehorning the Marvel model of cinematic world-building into an inherently standalone superhero origin story and now threatens to throw the future of Valiant’s into disarray right from the word go. It’s nothing more than a box-ticking exercise, an assembly-line product that is as easy to produce and reproduce as it is to forget. It’s the kind of movie that wants desperately to please everyone and ending up pleasing no one. 

Bloodshot never justifies its existence as a cinematic experience. Calling this movie a cinematic experience is an inaccurate description of its true color: a basic cable Vin Diesel action vehicle that, for some inexplicable reason, snuck its way to the big screen. It’s a half-assed, painfully undercooked cash grab, on par with a late career Bruce Willis, John Travolta or Nicolas Cage straight-to-video paycheck B-movie and another name-only installment to the long-running, one-time theatrical release-turned-bargain bin sequel-filled the Scorpion King or the Marine franchise. 

Taken as the feature-length directorial debut for visual effect artist David S.F. Wilson, it is unconvincing. Wilson’s vision is non-existent, exemplified in Bloodshot’s banal visual style. The way the scenes are staged is so artistically bankrupt and mechanically constructed to look no different than the average modern popcorn blockbuster that it suggests the work of a director-for-hire who is only there to serve as the mouthpiece for the actual captain (or captains, to be exact) of this ship: the producers, the studio executives and even the actors themselves. It definitely feels much like there are too many cooks in the kitchen, whose minds are pulled in such drastically different directions all at once, creating an indistinct impression instead. 

Because of that, its pacing is uneven, slipping more often into long dull patches that gradually lull its audience to sleep. There are certain scenes that ran far too long, there are some that finishes so abruptly it appears as if either the makers don’t know how to finish these scenes or they accidentally leave a few minutes worth of key information to make sense of the plot out on the cutting room floor, and then there are others where the characters are interacting with one another that are largely lifeless, going through the genre-movie motions without showing any emotion, which can be attributed to Wilson’s alarming lack of passion for the source material. These characters just don’t behave like real people. It’s like they are robots who look like a human being on the surface, but deep inside, they lack their personal lives and complexities to be truly human. 

But Wilson’s incompetence as a director does not excuse the underwhelming CGI on display, which is pretty disappointing considering the fact that it’s in his field of expertise. At the same time, such disappointment should not come as a surprise since the movie itself is already hastily conceived from the very beginning, machine-tooled to be dumped into the theaters with little to no fanfare, in the hopes those few who discovered it might help the makers get a quick buck in return. Funnily enough, the Bloodshot that they sent to the theaters is a rough cut of the movie, filled with half-completed, even uncompleted special effects. 

The CGI here is the theatrical release equivalent of Sharknado (2012), so detached from the live-action elements to the point where it’s ripped straight out of a Saturday morning cartoon. One can almost trace the digital aura lingering at every CGI-driven scene in broad daylight. To be fair, Bloodshot’s CGI is a slight improvement over the GIF animation-level CGI in those cheaply-made Indonesian colossal soap operas and even that is basically damning this movie with faint praise. Wilson’s attempt at recreating the distinct look and feel of the source material is as artificial as someone hanging a green screen sheet over a wall in a dark, empty room, placing a bunch of people in front of it while 3-D Microsoft screensaver images play out behind them through some projector to make it seem like they are standing in a real environment. 

There are a few occasions when a human actor is replaced by a fully CGI person whenever they are required to do something humanly impossible, and these scenes are so lazily rendered they come across as a series of Looney Tunes segments with the colors bleached to black. For proof, look no further than the big fight scene between Ray and his super soldier rival at RST Jimmy Dalton (Sam Heughan), dressed in mech armor with four sets of mechanical, tentacle-like arms on his back, which, without going into too much detail, begins in the hallway of a tall building and culminates with them falling down an elevator shaft. 

This entire CGI sequence is like a video game cut-scene, whether it’s the herky jerky movements of Dalton’s Doc Ock-like arms propping him up as he is chasing after Ray down a hallway or the punch line of the camera zooming in uncomfortably on a CGI man with Vin Diesel’s face attached to his head. Despite the so-bad-it’s-good enjoyment that comes from witnessing a CGI Vin Diesel, for a movie backed by a giant studio of Columbia Pictures’ stature to let things like that pass by, it’s a pretty embarrassing sight. 

Perhaps even more so than the CGI, the action is astonishingly regressive. This is one of those brain-dead action movies that should have come out in the summer of 2003 or basically any year during the early-to-mid-2000’s and somehow got pushed back until 2020 when it’s a decade or nearly two too late. Like every early-to-mid-2000’s action movie, Wilson and his editor Jim May adopt an over-stylized, overproduced approach to the filmmaking, eventually succumbing to the genre’s worst tendencies. Bloodshot slavishly adheres to the strictures of the typical Michael Bay action movie, rife with plenty of the director’s trademark Bayhem such as the hyperactive quick-cut editing, slow motion, oversaturated color palette and things going boom left and right. 

And it makes for an incomprehensible viewing. It’s really hard to appreciate any of its choreography when everything looks like it has been heavily censored to obtain the box office-friendly PG-13 rating and blurry images and blurry shadows rushing in and out of frame to imply an action sequence. Such trouble with Bloodshot comes as swiftly as its opening sequence. 

The movie kicks off in vintage Michael Bay fashion, where Ray displays American jingoism with sledgehammer-subtlety as he leads a covert one-man military unit to rescue a hostage from a bunch of stereotypical Arabian terrorists somewhere far off in an Arabian country. As always, the mission devolves into a restlessly hyperactive shootout between Ray and the terrorists. This whole action sequence is a headache-inducing ordeal, comprising of static images that’s been stitched together to look like they are the moving images of a movie. 

Its single redeeming quality is Steve Jablonsky’s energetic score. Jablonsky’s composition is reminiscent of his work in the Transformers movies, with his signature brass sections, pounding military snares and guitar riffs trying its hardest to arouse any semblance of excitement not only to the opening sequence, but every scene in the movie when his music is present. It’s unfortunate that the events onscreen are so boring it gets in the way of the decent music. Sometimes, May’s Michael Bay-style editing is just all showing off, but frequently, it’s there to hide the poor stunt work. 

Bloodshot’s quick patch-up job is more palpable during a Bourne-esque close quarter combat sequence between Vin Diesel and two goons in a cramped bathroom, where some cuts look stiff and clearly fake to the point where it indicates an action hero whose old age is catching up with him. Rarely does the camera linger long enough to show Vin Diesel doing some physical harm to these goons, with each angle lasting no more than a second, as if it’s aware of the actor’s incapability of performing his own stunts. Many of Vin Diesel’s fight sequences are him about to land a punch, and then cut to a different angle and a flurry of sound effects before the next scene finds his opponents magically down on the floor, knocked out cold, in which those missing scenes in between deprive the action of any intensity. 

At the same time, these are all the reflections of its uninspired script, which has been credited to Eric Heisserer, who wrote the Oscar-nominated Arrival (2016), and then Jeff Wadlow, who wrote and directed cinematic turkeys of Truth or Dare (2018) and Fantasy Island (2020) caliber. But Heisserer’s contribution is indiscernible, resulting in Bloodshot being a cautionary tale about a Hollywood production allowing Wadlow overwhelming creative control and its dangerous consequences. His misguided storytelling instinct is encapsulated by a scene where a lighthearted conversation between RST’s CEO/ Ray’s mentor Emil Harting (Guy Pearce) and his tech guy Eric (Siddharth Dhananjay) turns into the former ranting in rambling fashion about Hollywood movie cliches. This scene drips with the irony of how the movie thinks of itself as subversive, only for the plotting to revert back to formula. 

That said-plot is a baffling hodgepodge of action/sci-fi/superhero elements from much better original entertainments. Heisserer and Wadlow’s version of screenwriting are them sitting in a room, reading scripts from classics such as the Terminator (1984), Universal Soldier (1992), Robocop (1987), Inception (2010) and etc., finding the best parts and then outright rewriting them, shot-for-shot, moment-to-moment, until they all form a “new” movie screenplay. The changes to the characters’ names are the closest thing it has to innovation. One can just spit out the many movies that Bloodshot shamelessly ripped off and the list would be as long and thick as a Stephen King novel. That feeling of familiarity is ill-suited for a narrative built on a twisty construction. 

Even those who haven’t seen its spoiler-y trailer can sense the shocking revelation of Harting’s ulterior motive coming from a mile away. Speaking of Harting, his characterization confirms the suspicion that Hollywood can only make the same kinds of blockbuster movies over and over again. Harting is nothing more than a blander clone of the Aldrich Killian character Guy Pearce, coincidentally, once played in Iron Man 3 (2013), who is forced to repeat the same arc he had gone through seven years ago. Finer details such as Harting being a mad scientist type with some form of disability (an amputee with a robotic arm this time around instead of a cripple) and a power-hungry obsession to eliminate his competition in the nano-technology business in whatever way necessary prompt unflattering comparison to Pearce’s Marvel alter-ego. 

Mere minutes after that twist, Bloodshot gets too clever for its own good when it takes a more conspiratorial turn regarding Ray’s death. Heisserer and Wadlow paint themselves into a corner by inventing a convoluted way to explain a rather straightforward situation. There isn’t really any build up that warrants such decision-making. If anything, it renders everything that came before emotionally and even logically irrelevant. Any potential its main theme of reality versus fantasy had is squandered by its frustrating contraption of red herrings. This gimmick is so overplayed over the course of the movie it’s hard to care about anything that’s happening on the screen. 

And it’s even harder when Bloodshot keeps mistaking plot for lengthy exposition dump. Its idea of character development is by having people just spew pointless scientific mumbo jumbo with the sole purpose of speaking out the plot. The movie is so wrapped up in its science that it leaves the main character out to dry. 

Ray is a blank canvas, whose military man stoicism and invincibility make him as dull as dishwater. Stripped of any human dimension, he is just another straight-faced action hero whose character is mostly defined by punching people in the face. There is a subplot exploring his relationship with his wife Gina (Talulah Riley) during a honeymoon period that’s so heavily truncated it carries as much depth as a travelogue montage. It doesn’t help when the movie characterizes Gina as the object of a male gaze, evident from the story’s decision to give her little to no dialogue save for a scene when she’s in bed with Ray, her naked backside facing the camera. 

By contrast, Ray’s handler during his time at RST KT (Eiza Gonzalez) is more fleshed out. KT and even Martin Axe’s (Toby Kebbell) dancing shoes (filmed like a Quentin Tarantino movie) have more personality than Ray. KT is the only character who has any semblance of an arc, a motivation that drives her to step out of her comfort zone, however conventional and patriarchal it may be.  

As far as the performances go, Bloodshot is a case of talented actors sleepwalking through their roles.

Vin Diesel is indescribably bad as Ray Garrison/Bloodshot. Here, Diesel lacks the usual screen presence and physicality he brought to past action hero characters. His dramatic acting though is the stuff of unintentional comedy gold, the kind of which Lamorne Morris (sporting a spotty British accent) and Siddharth Dhananjay as hacker Wilfred Wigans and Harting’s tech guy Eric respectively cannot offer. Guy Pearce looks bored out of his mind playing Emil Harting, doing nothing new to distinguish this character to his Aldrich Killian role in Iron Man 3. Toby Kebbell is under-used, reduced to doing a cringe-worthy Sam Rockwell-inspired dance routine, as British gangster Martin Axe. Sam Heughan takes his steroid-fuelled G.I. Joe archetype to the most over-the-top extreme as Jimmy Dalton. Eiza Gonzalez gives the movie’s most compelling performance as KT, channeling her inner Gal Gadot with a feminine swagger and badass fighting skills. 

CONCLUSION: 

Bloodshot marks a shockingly terrible start to the Valiant Cinematic Universe in this sloppy, generic and half-baked mess of a comic book movie, with dumb plot, boring characters, confused tone, poorly-edited action sequences and slapdash production value. 

Score: 3/10