War Machine Review – A Competent By-The-Numbers Actioner Buoyed By Alan Ritchson’s Brute Force Charisma

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Reacher star Alan Ritchson is the main reason to cue up War Machine, the latest film from Australian director Patrick Hughes (Red Hill, The Hitman’s Bodyguard). The big fella is just so soulful as 81, the oldest prospect undergoing the Ranger Assessment and Selection Program, haunted as he is by his failure to save his brother (an underused Jai Courtney) in Afghanistan and determined not to bond with his fellow hoo-rah hopefuls. They all have numbers instead of names too, which is either realistic or a red flag, depending on your point of view.

Their big final field exercise, already a grueling ordeal, is made even more so when they find themselves up against the advance guard of an honest-to-HG-Wells alien invasion in the form of a giant honking robot that looks more Robot Jox than Pacific Rim. Can 81 overcome his emotional baggage and win out against the extraterrestrial exterminator, pulling the trigger on an impressive number of Chekhov’s Guns along the way? Well, of course – it’s that sort of movie.

While the big robot provides us with most of the action spectacle, War Machine works better when it’s just functioning as a survival thriller, with Ritchson and his fellow recruits (Stephan James, Keiynan Lonsdale, Daniel Webber, Jack Patten, et al) overcoming the more mundane and tangible threats of a forced wilderness march.

Hughes is a competent action director who can wring plenty of tension out of trying to rope over a raging river, but he can’t do much with a script that pays off its narrative in such thuddingly obvious and predictable ways.

Unfortunately, he co-wrote it with James Beaufort, so what can you do? War Machine isn’t terrible, mind you – if you’re into this kind of macho military drama, it’s a decent enough time killer. But it’s too resolutely ordinary to recommend any more strongly.

War Machine is streaming on Netflix now.