Bloodshot (2020)

When this started, I thought it was going to be another generic (if not terrible) action movie, vaguely tied to the war in the Middle East, where Vin Diesel was going to get some superpowers (somehow) and save the day. I also expected there to be far more scenes of blatantly incorrect “military” things where the DOD clearly wasn’t involved for guidance.
Call me jaded, thanks to Mark Wahlberg and Michael Bay movies.

To explain my first-impression distaste: it’s titled “Bloodshot” (2020) and it opened with Ray Garrison (Vin Diesel) wearing OCPs without any identifying patches or name-tapes, with the sleeves pushed up to his shoulders, raiding a house by himself in Mombasa and saving the day with a possible - but not plausible - quick-draw shoot-out.
Then, when his C-130 transport landed at Aviano Air Base, his wife was allowed to drive her car onto the flight line to pick him up, whereupon he pulled off his OCP top and revealed that he was only wearing a white tank top underneath.
It felt like it was leading to a Bay-hem ‘splosion-fest, which is not a good thing if it’s something I’m not already expecting.

After that though, things started to feel much more ‘normal’ and appropriately cinematic.

Ray and his wife Gina (Talulah Riley) drove to an adorable Italian costal city where they spent the night being attractive in public. The next morning, Gina was missing and Ray found himself tied to a chair in an industrial freezer, where the movie’s villain, Martin Axe, showed up with Gina also tied to a chair. Martin danced his way into the freezer wearing a winter coat and flip-flops, accompanied by “Pyscho Killer” by Talking Heads, which made for a very entertaining entrance.
Martin threatened to kill her if Ray didn’t disclose exactly how the DOD got the intel for the mission he’d just executed. Ray, being the boots-on-the-ground guy, didn’t have any idea as to how that info was gained, so Martin killed Gina with an air compressor, then shot and killed Ray out of anger.

Obviously Ray didn’t stay dead or this would have been a very short movie.

Instead he awoke with a fully functioning body and zero memory in the research labs at Rising Spirit Technologies, a bioengineering firm in the military industrial complex, run by Dr. Emil Harting (Guy Pearce).
Apparently Dr. Harting had a deal with the DOD to take freshly-dead soldiers and run experiments on their corpses if there was no family to claim them - I can only imagine how illegal that would be in real life, and the public uproar it would cause if ever revealed.
Turned out that Ray was the first successful member of the “Bloodshot” program, which turned him from an already-great spec-ops guy into an unkillable god-monster with the help of nanobots.
Harting’s previous successes had simply been for next-next-gen prosthetics for wounded vets, and his display of those prosthetics included the introduction of Ray’s new team: KT (Eiza Gonzalez), Jimmy (Sam Heughan), and Tibbs (Alex Hernandez), who were, in this order: attractive, an asshole, completely forgettable.
KT very much felt like she was there solely to hold Ray’s hand as he got used to his new super-body. She gave him a military challenge coin, shared some contrived platitudes about being part of a team, and otherwise stood around wearing croptops and looking dramatic. By the end she’d played a very critical role in Ray’s arc, but she wasn’t nearly as fleshed-out or consistently utilized as she should have been.
Jimmy was immediately a dick. Ray had been awake for all of maybe 30 minutes and Jimmy already seemed to hate his guts. There was an “explanation” about halfway through, but it didn’t make his attitude make more sense, as his anger seemed to be entirely rooted around “You died and got nanobots; I lost my legs and got the ultimate pair of prosthetics - life isn’t fair and it’s your fault.”
And Tibbs just was. Seriously. Had they taken his character out of the movie completely, nothing would have changed.

KT had been a Navy Seal, but got her throat blown out during a raid in Syria, and Tibbs was… something. I don’t remember, but he lost his eyesight.
Dr. Harting’s solution for KT was a chest-mounted respirator that apparently made her immune to any inhalants, and chest-mounted cameras for Tibbs.
While impressive feats of biomechanical engineering, those “fixes” meant that neither individual could ever wear anything more than a tank top, otherwise they’d lose some very critical functions.
Very short-sighted, Dr. Harting.

Anyway:
Something sparked a hidden memory in Ray’s mind and he remembered Martin and Gina and Martin killing Gina, so he got in a truck and left. Thanks to the power of nanobots, he was able to mentally scan the web and collect the data necessary to hunt down the badguys in his quest to get revenge.

The “nanobots in his blood are helping him do XYZ!” trick was played up a little too much a few different times for non-punching actions - there’s no reason he would have known that was something he could do, or how to control it.

But it did lead to an absolutely outstanding fight scene: Ray, now effectively immortal, single-handedly took out an entire convoy of henchmen. He survived bullets and grenades and rocket-launchers.
At one point, the side of his face was blown off, but because he was made of nanobots, we were treated to an exceptionally cool display of his face rebuilding itself while he turned back to his assailant and taking them out. Reminiscent of the T-X from “Terminator 3” (2003), but better.
Even when a part of him was fully blown off and left on the ground, we saw that the nanobots could swarm up and fly back to him to reconnect to the hive. It was a very cool shot that established a rule, which Ray broke later when he ‘poured’ some nanobots from a cut in his hand into an open cup and just left them there.

And this fight scene happened in Hungary, in a very specific tunnel in the middle of the city I remember driving through with my family on multiple occasions. While I never got into any fights there, it was very cool to get to see an old haunt as a key filming location.

Having reviewed a series of unnecessarily gruesome movies recently, I was surprised at how not gory this was.
Gunshots were heard and muzzle flashes were seen, but there was no splatter. When explosions happened, we didn’t watch body parts fly through the sky like streamers at a Jeffrey Dahmer-themed birthday party.
For a movie titled “Bloodshot,” they clearly didn’t feel the need to live up to the title.

I would like to give kudos to the director and the writing staff: Ray was a spec-ops soldier, which meant that he was already fairly well-trained in the ways of weapons and hand-to-hand combat. They didn’t waste any time showing him learning how to fight, simply that he was getting used to his new body that didn’t have the limitations of flesh. Two birds with one stone: no training montage, no inexplicable skill sets.
Furthermore: there were three full fight scenes. We got to watch Ray mop the floor with bad guys three separate times, in varying and creative ways.
And everything was told and shown so tightly. There were no filler scenes, no bits that went on too long or didn’t make sense. Every detail felt like it was there for a reason.

As this was an American movie based around a super soldier, it obviously ended on a positive note. Ray took out the villain with spectacular aplomb, while the villain’s second-in-commands were equally well dealt-with.
The villain’s motivations didn’t really make sense. He was clearly out for revenge of his own, but it wasn’t explained why he wanted revenge or why he’d targeted Ray in the first place.
His ultimate goal was some iteration of “I want to be the very best (worst), like no one ever was,” which was a bit bland, but whatever.
Fortunately, that didn’t need to be key to his character development, as his actions during the movie showed us just how cruel and heartless he was.

There was also the computer hacker Wilfred (Lamorne Morris), who made the best example of comic relief I’ve ever seen. He was quirky, his character had agency despite being such a small role, and his quippy commentary was used sparingly and sparsely, so it always fit perfectly but never went over the top.
The way he spoke makes me think the scrip just had “Morris improv here” for most of his lines.

The soundtrack was appropriately dramatic. It very much felt like a knockoff of “The Avengers” main theme, but that’s okay - I’d rather have a discount version of an amazing soundtrack than a shitty, all-original one.

The graphics, on the other hand, were surprisingly bad. Any practical effects or scenes where the characters were doing normal human things looked fine, but any scene where a body was moving too fast or otherwise moving in unusual ways, looked horrible. There was one scene that took place on the side of a building and the CGI renders of Ray and his opponent looked like they came from a cutscene from the video game “Deus Ex: Mankind Divided” (2016).

This was based on the comic book series of the same name which I’d never heard of until “based on the comic book series…” showed up in the credits. In many ways, I’m glad I didn’t know it was a comic book movie, because I got to watch it as audience member simply getting introduced to a super soldier out for revenge.
I didn’t ponder whether or not they’d followed a specific storyline, or if what they were showing in a 2-hour movie was the compressed version of decades of print material or just the origin, or the likelihood of getting a sequel.
Actually, I hope they don’t make a sequel for this. It was an outstanding stand-alone story that completed Ray’s character arc very cleanly and ended with an appropriately positive ending.
While he made for an excellent new hero character to watch, I don’t think there’s a follow-on plot line that could be nearly as emotionally powerful as this was.

A quick google search suggests that the comic books took place in the U.S., but most of the plot happened in the U.K., which was a weird choice, especially as Ray’s truck was a large Ford pickup that very much stood out against the other cars.

And of note: the director, David Wilson, only has IMDB credits for working visual effects for a handful of other blockbuster movies. I have no idea how he scored the chance to direct a big-budget film with Diesel and Pearce, but he did it so damn right. I hope his future movies are just as good.

Was this perfect?
No, of course not, and neither are any other superhero movies from the last decade, but this one had an outstanding twist about halfway through that nothing from Marvel has come close to. The main reason it lost a Claw was the military-incorrectness at the end and the bad special effects.
This released in theaters in March of 2020, less than a week before the COVID-19 lock down. Sony smartly put this out for streaming and rental a mere two weeks later.
Truly, I’m sad I didn’t get to see this on the silver screen - I would have happily watched it there.