War Machine is the worst kind of bad movie: It's too dour to have any fun, and just on the wrong side of competent to elicit any laughs, intentional or otherwise.
The setup is a familiar trope that lends itself to an amiable self-discovery story. The problem is that it's filtered through ugly and jingoistic military propaganda at a time when we really don't need it.
Alan Ritchson, a charismatic actor capable of soulful performances, plays a nameless grunt with a dream of joining the Ranger Corps in honor of his dead brother. He's over the hill in both age and physical capability, but simple realities or gravity don't slow him down at all. He is determined to make it to "the finish line," symbolized here by a literal finish line with the Ranger Corps insignia.
Joonatan Itkonen
After a grueling and utterly uninspired first half, where Ritchson goes through boot camp as his superiors hurl insults at him, he and a small team graduate to their final mission. They have to travel to a remote location to exfiltrate an asset and escape before anyone catches them. A typical training operation to test everything they've learnt.
Except this time is different, as a rogue asteroid circling Earth turns out to be an alien invasion force, and the team has to fight for their survival with nothing but their wits.
War Machine borrows heavily from films like Battle: Los Angeles and Dog Soldiers, but doesn't seem to understand what made either film work. The characters are so thin they barely count as archetypes. The dialogue is rote and perfunctory, and only serves to remind audiences using the film as second-screen content that it's still on. The action is lazy and uninspired, and the pacing relies on a promise that the second half, where the genre shifts from military porn into sci-fi military porn, is better than the first.
To illustrate how little the film cares about its own script, none of the characters have names. It plays with the idea that even when robbed of their identity, our heroes are charming enough to make a lasting impression through their actions alone. That doesn't happen. Instead, only Ritchson is memorable, and that's mainly because he's so much better in everything else, you can't help but wonder why he's slumming it here.
The enemies don't fare any better. As with Battle: Los Angeles, War Machine frames the invasion from a "realistic" perspective, which means it doesn't have the budget for a full-scale epic. Instead, Ritchson and his team fight a clumsily designed Transformers outcast that looks and moves like a chicken. In theory, there's a lot you could get out of an unstoppable killing machine that can scan the environment from dozens of kilometers away in its search for prey.
But somehow, War Machine fails here, too. The robot chicken only appears to move the turgid plot along at regular intervals, with little to no consistency in its logic. The film pays lip service to classics like War of the Worlds and Jaws, but again fails to establish any rhyme or reason to its monsters.
There's an early setup in which the robot chicken distorts compasses as it gets closer, and for a moment, it seems War Machine has stumbled on a clever, effective way to build tension. Instead, it's used once and then promptly forgotten.
War Machine could work as a short film, especially one that leans far more on Ritchson's natural charisma. As a feature, it's so painfully short on story and ideas that you can tell it has to stretch itself thin just to hit a runtime. Almost everything in the first half could be a montage, and we'd lose nothing. Especially if it meant we didn't have to sit through Dennis Quaid cosplaying a tough guy for the hundredth time.
What's worse is that it doesn't have to be this way. War Machine has all the potential to be a decent enough direct-to-video title—a brisk 90-minute effects-bonanza with a great lead that doesn't demand much from its audience.
Instead, every instinct the filmmakers follow proves wrong, and the result is a soulless advertisement for the military-industrial complex that says nothing beyond "oo-rah" as it meanders into obscurity.
