Crew
Director/Story – Patrick Hughes, Screenplay – James Beaufort & Patrick Hughes, Producers – Rich Cook, Patrick Hughes, Todd Lieberman, Greg McLean & Alexander Young, Photography – Aaron Morton, Music – Dmitri Golovko, Visual Effects Supervisor – Ray McIntyre Jr., Visual Effects – Fin Design + Effects (Supervisor – Stuart White), Framestore (Supervisor – Joao Sita) & Rising Sun Pictures (Supervisor – Jason Billington & Dennis Jones), Special Effects Supervisor – Peter Stubbs, Production Design – Enzo Iacono. Production Company – Hidden Pictures/Huge Film/Range Media Partners.
Cast
Alan Ritchson (81), Stephan James (7), Blake Richardson (17), Dennis Quaid (Sergeant-Major Sheridan), Esai Morales (Sergeant Torres), Jai Courtney (Squad Leader), Alex King (44), Keiynan Lonsdale (60), Jack Patten (109), James Beaufort (23), Jacob Hohua (72), Daniel Webber (57), Richard Cotta (13), Matt Testro (38), Victory Noukwe (135), Joshua Diaz (96), Heather Burridge (122), Yuchen Wang (111)
Plot
A soldier is serving as a staff sergeant in Kabul. He stops to aid a broken-down convoy containing his brother. He and his brother reminisce about their dream of signing up for the Rangers and make plans to do so, just as they come under attack by insurgents. The soldier tries to carry his wounded brother out to safety but his brother dies. Two years later, the soldier joins RASP, the Ranger training program in Colorado. He is accepted and given the number 81. As 81, he excels in every physical training task but the command staff do not want to accept him because he has single-mindedly blanked out his grief, does not bond with the other trainees and has refused command. On their final exercise, they are assigned to find a downed aircraft and destroy it, while 81 is placed in command. This goes well but the craft they think is their target turns out to be a giant robot of alien origin that immediately turns on and begins eliminating their numbers. 81 leads the survivors as they attempt to get to safety at the same time as the alien war machine hunts them.
The Action Movie has all but disappeared in the 2020s. It has been a staple from the 1980s through to the 2010s but, apart from pre-established franchises like The Fast and the Furious, Mission: Impossible and Taken, the old action film that used to star names like Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Van Damme, Norris, Statham etc has now been relegated to occasional efforts on streaming services. The sole new non-pre-established work that has had any success amid this has been the John Wick franchise. I am not sure the reasons for such – maybe Hollywood is no longer interested in chasing a primarily male-oriented demographic anymore? maybe the action film has been supplanted by the superhero film? maybe it is the decline of star-oriented vehicles or the collapse of the mid-budget range film where most action films used to reside? That said, War Machine is one such return to the form and enjoyed reasonable popularity, accumulating 44 million views in its first week after it premiered on Netflix.
War Machine was the sixth feature film from Australian director Patrick Hughes who first appeared with the crime film Red Hill (2010). This seemed to impress sufficient people that Hughes was brought to Hollywood to make The Expendables 3 (2014) and then The Hitman’s Bodyguard (2017) and The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard (2021), as well as The Man from Toronto (2022).
War Machine has the near-invincible looking Alan Ritchson in the lead. Ritchson has an interesting career, the son of an Air Force master sergeant who turned male model then actor. He has played a surprising number of superhero roles including Aquaman in tv’s Smallville (2001-11), Raphael in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014) and sequel, and Hawk in tv’s Titans (2021-3). He has been in everything from The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013) to Fast X (2023), although the part that he is most well-known for is the title role in tv’s Reacher (2022- ). With 6’3” frame and bulked up to look like a proverbial brick shithouse, you wonder whether the title is meant to refer to Ritchson’s soldier hero or the film’s robotic nemesis.
I don’t mind watching action films, although it is not my preferred genre. What switches me off with War Machine is that we get about thirty minutes before the robot is introduced that consists of little more than brutally tough military training rituals. I really have zero interest in ‘militainment’ and the US tough guy wankery of films like Act of Valor (2012) and Lone Survivor (2013). One recent military SF/action hybrid Osiris (2015) was an exercise in utter tedium.
That said, the middle section once we get out into the wilderness have a gritty tough realism to them as though the director and cast had really been through a military bootcamp and were determined to show everything they had learned up on screen. As the robot enters the scene, the action element goes for broke – wiping out almost the entire detachment without mercy and leaving Ritchson and the survivors fighting for their lives every step of the way against a relentless nemesis. The robot is nothing we haven’t seen before – generic The Terminator through Transformers films fodder. In effect, War Machine is really The War of the Worlds (1898), albeit reduced to one alien war machine and with a military focus.
A common criticism of the action film is that its heroes get no character development – they are monosyllabic, inchoate blocks of woods. Not so, Ritchson here. The film gives him a surprisingly strong character arc over unhealed wounds and grief from losing his brother in Afghanistan to suppressing his feelings and gradually being forced into a position where he has to take a leadership responsibility that he doesn’t want. Ritchson’s monosyllabic and single tightly gritted expression helps sell it and is one of the better pieces of character one has seen in an action film.
Trailer here