It’s sometimes nice to see Vin Diesel branch out from the norm. The Fast and Furious star has built a high profile career on his namesake series and the equally as fun XXX franchise. Occasionally he’ll branch out and do other films to shake things up and give us something fresh, exciting, and fun. Bloodshot isn’t one of those times. 

Inspired by the comic book of the same name, Bloodshot takes Vin Diesel and places him in one of the most bland and uninteresting depictions of a dystopian future. Each frame of the world shrouded by black, grey and red hues. Each set looks as if it’s made of concrete, providing an aesthetically unappealing film right from the offset. With the bland backdrop we’re given a stereotypical set up of having US Marine Ray Garrison (Vin Diesel) and his wife Gina (Talulah Riley) being kidnapped and tortured by mercenaries over a previous operation that Ray was a part of. Predictably the mercenaries kill them before we have any time to get to know these characters and feel any sort of emotions towards them.

Ray is eventually recovered and rebuilt by Rising Spirit Tech, a tech company that develops technology for the US Military. Using artificial enhancements, Ray develops the ability to recover instantly from all forms of injury and is sent on assignment to avenge his wife. Using this typical and uninspired action movie set up, Bloodshot attempts to pull the rug out from underneath you by providing a mid film “twist” setting up the film’s villain but rather than be inspired or shocking the twist winds up being eye roll inducing at the level of incompetence that is being executed on screen. Bloodshot features one of the messiest screenplays of recent years, and feels like it was written in one weekend.

Bloodshot makes many attempts to deliver the over-the-top action we’ve come to know and love from the Fast and Furious franchise but instead delivers some of the sloppiest and messiest  action sequences in recent memory.from a big budget movie.The scenes turn into a messy whirlwind of metal, blood, and have no sense of direction in any of them. The side characters are extremely one note and are barely worth remembering, which is a shame because the case features some very talented folks such as Toby Kebbel, Elza Gonzalez, Sam Heughan and Guy Pearce as an admittedly charismatic villain. It seems these characters weren’t given time to be fleshed out as to not steal the spotlight from Vin Diesel’s protagonist, which let’s be honest, would not be very hard to do.

Overall Bloodshot is not good. Plain and simple. The trailers delivered an interesting premise of a Fast and Furious cranked up to 11, but failed to deliver on almost every front. It has a predictable, uninspired story, one note side characters to not distract from it’s boring lead, and some of the most laborious, incomprehensible action in a blockbuster to date. You think a movie that features a villain with mechanical arms would be at least somewhat interesting, but honestly Bloodshot should’ve remained dead.

Bloodshot is available on DVD and VOD now

by Reyna Cervantes

Reyna (She/They) is located in southern California! They are an aspiring screenwriter with experience in sound design and production work, their 3 favourite films are Evil Dead 2, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, and Frances Ha. All of their social handles are @JFCDoomblade (twitter, insta, letterboxd).