War Machine Gets Away With Far Too Much – A Review

War Machine had me gripped by sequences I thought were colossally stupid. I worried about whether these people would get out while also wondering why they had ended up in that situation.

Director Patrick Hughes sends Alan Ritchson through Army Ranger selection, then sets an enormous alien machine loose on the recruits during their final exercise. Ritchson plays 81, a combat engineer carrying the trauma of his brother’s death into a programme they had intended to complete together. He can handle the physical demands, but refuses to take command. The film leaves little doubt about where that is going. Predator with a giant robot, and a lesson in leadership waiting at the finish line.

There is plenty to work with there. The machine looks good, has an imposing bulk like something straight out of Metal Gear, and does appalling things to the people it catches. Hughes does not shy away from the gore, which gives the pursuit some much-needed nastiness. These are not particularly interesting characters, but the prospect of watching another one get torn apart is enough to make their immediate survival matter.

The trouble is that War Machine keeps interfering with a threat it has already established perfectly well. A machine this large apparently has to occupy itself with one target at a time. Surely there is room for another weapon somewhere on the thing. Its grenades, meanwhile, become less destructive when somebody important needs to survive one. An explosion sends people over a cliff that suddenly looks much more forgiving than it did before they went over it. The film wants the force of these attacks without consistently accepting their consequences.

The recruits do not help. At one point, seven of them pile onto a single makeshift rope line. The alien robot appears and all seven are in trouble, which gives Hughes an effective predicament but makes their decision difficult to accept. After all that emphasis on their training, I expected more convincing judgement. An unfamiliar enemy is enough of a disadvantage without the screenplay making them look incapable.

For all the time spent establishing what it takes to become a Ranger, there is little convincing thought behind either their choices or their dialogue. “If he wants to be a Ranger, he’s gonna have to lead” is an actual line somebody felt we needed. I understood what 81 was supposed to learn considerably earlier than I understood why he needed to learn it. His grief and sense of failure are clear enough, but they never adequately explain his insistence on refusing command. I kept expecting the film to give us something more.

It is hardly reluctant to explain anything else.

The fairly strong opening gives way to an exposition dump, conveniently situated news reports supply information, and an early remark about engineering limits could not have been more obvious foreshadowing. This is Netflix writing for people who are also doing something else. If you are paying attention, much of the dialogue is telling you what you already know.

Ritchson does better when he has less to say. The underwater shot of him walking with weights is surprisingly cool, and Hughes certainly knows how to make use of his size. Watching this enormous man begin to shake is more affecting. His trauma becomes convincing in a way the discussion around his character rarely manages. There should have been more room for that performance and fewer reminders of the character arc.

Mostly, though, he gets put through an extraordinary amount of punishment. Somehow, Number 7 still has it worse. He loses command, gets his femur broken, is dragged through the woods and up mountains, dunked in rapids and then sent over a waterfall while unconscious.

Ritchson hauling him through all this looks exhausting. The effort is convincing even when the circumstances are ridiculous, and I was much more interested in whether he could keep going than in another declaration about what his endurance meant. The film insists on supplying those anyway, turning the ordeal into the same corny lesson about becoming a Ranger. Add an armoured vehicle sequence that feels designed to show off the hardware, and it becomes military slop with an alien attached.

The final confrontation does deliver. Using the quarry equipment to trap the machine and choke its ventilation gives 81 a satisfying way to turn his engineering experience against it. The earlier foreshadowing could hardly have been more obvious, but Hughes makes good on it. For a film that had spent so long irritating me, it ended remarkably well.

War Machine is a dumb film with just enough going for it to keep me watching. Annoyingly, I enjoyed it.