Bloodshot Parent Guide

Elite special operations soldier Ray Garrison (Vin Diesel) has a pretty ordinary life - deploying to mysterious locations, murdering armed insurgents, and sustaining life-threatening injuries on a regular basis. Returning home from one particularly dangerous hostage rescue, Garrison is kidnapped along with his wife, who is killed in an attempt to extort military secrets from him. About to be murdered, Garrison drops a witty quip…and wakes up in a hospital bed. Having died, Garrison has been rebuilt as a super-soldier. Now, full of nanobots and murderous rage, Garrison sets out to get his revenge.

At one point about half an hour into the movie, the Big Bad Guy, Dr. Emil Harting (Guy Pearce) starts ripping into one of his technicians over the memories he’s built for Garrison, saying: “You’ve already ripped off every movie cliché there is.” The writing team seems to have taken this tacit acknowledgement of the hackneyed nature of the film as carte blanche to continue to run up the score of bad clichés. My least favorite of which is female characters being used mostly as motivational subjects for the male lead or as sex objects for male viewers. It doesn’t make for pleasant viewing.

As if to double down on the unpleasantness, the action scenes are so poorly shot that I started to feel vaguely ill. It takes a lot to make me queasy in a theatre (like, say, the vomit-comet of Gemini Man in 3D), and this had me wondering if it was worth closing my eyes and making my notes based on sound effects. Remember all the shaky-cam footage in the Bourne films? Picture that but with abysmal choreography, plasticky CGI inserts, and worse editing.

This is pretty grisly for a PG-13. Since the protagonist is an unkillable rage machine, he shrugs off grenades to the torso, glass to the face, and several hundred gunshot wounds, which are presented in varying shades of explicit detail. He also deals out similar damage to his foes, but since they aren’t full of nanobots, they tend to just die messily. Combined with some brief toplessness (the side of a woman’s breasts being visible) and a few dozen swears, you have a movie which is unsuitable for family viewing.

On the whole, Bloodshot looks a little tired and worn out - unsurprising, considering it is overburdened with overused tropes, wooden acting, and some truly terrible writing. The movie shambles along its 109 minutes with a vague amnesia about itself, hoping you won’t remember how awkward the character chemistry is when it relies on that non-existent spark to fuel the flaccid plot. And if you think using “flaccid” was a bit…below the belt, wait ‘til you hear the movie’s idea of a fun genital joke. It’s downhill from there.