Review | Bloodshot film review: Vin Diesel is all muscles and mumbles in one-note comic book adaptation
- This story of a soldier, who is rebuilt after being murdered and launches a vendetta, is one-dimensional and derivative
- Vin Diesel fails to impress, and although the CGI is well executed, the backdrops are a disaster
2/5 stars
In the early 1990s, Valiant Comics launched the character Bloodshot. Now limping into cinemas is the film version starring Vin Diesel.
The Fast & The Furious star can have his off days, and this derivative sci-fi is one of them. His turn as Ray Garrison, a soldier who gets rebuilt RoboCop-style after he’s murdered, is about as one note as they come. All muscles and mumbles and not much up top.
Directed by David S.F. Wilson, Bloodshot has the feeling of a generic comic book yarn, the sort that used to regularly clutter the multiplexes before Marvel hit its stride.
There are enough twists here to make it a tricky plot to convey without spoiling, but suffice it to say that Garrison wakes up after his murder in a glitzy tech company, run by Guy Pearce’s visionary scientist, Dr Emil Harting, along with his augmented assistant, K.T. ( Baby Driver star Eiza González).
He remembers nothing of his killing at the hands of Toby Kebbell’s gun-toting Australian terrorist, who arrives in the meat freezer where he’s holding Garrison wearing a silver puffer jacket and dancing to Talking Heads’ Psycho Killer. (It’s an amusing entrance, arguably the last time you’ll smile in this formulaic story). Nor does Garrison recall that his wife Gina (Talulah Riley) was bumped off in front of his eyes.