110 min | PG-13 | March 13, 2020 | Columbia Pictures
Ray Garrison dies a hero and wakes up a product, rebuilt with nanites by a biotech company that hands him a tragedy to avenge. The man is unstoppable. Pity the movie around him is not.
Ray Garrison is a soldier who dies and comes back. A biotech company called Rising Spirit Technologies fills his body with nanites that heal any wound and rewrite his physiology on command. They tell him his wife was murdered and let him hunt the killer. The film is about a man who does not know that his grief is programmed and his enemy is assigned. Bloodshot wants to be a thriller about manufactured reality. It settles for being an action movie that explains its own twist out loud.
Vin Diesel plays Ray Garrison as a slab of muscle running on borrowed memories. He delivers the rage scenes at one volume and the confusion scenes at the same volume. Guy Pearce plays Dr. Emil Harting, the executive who owns Ray’s body and feeds him lies, with a smooth corporate menace that is the best thing on screen. Eiza González plays KT, an augmented soldier who breathes through a throat implant, and gives the part more interior life than the script earns. Toby Kebbell plays Martin Axe as a cartoon villain who dances to “Psycho Killer” before he kills. Sam Heughan plays Jimmy Dalton with a sneer and not much underneath it.
David S. F. Wilson directs his first feature after a career building visual effects, and it shows in both directions. The action set pieces are clean and weightless. A fight inside a flour-filled tunnel turns the screen into clouds of white powder lit red by the glow under Ray’s skin. It is the one image in the film with real composition behind it. Jeff Wadlow and Eric Heisserer write a script that keeps stopping to explain the rules of the nanites, and the explanations drain the tension from every reveal. The third act collapses into weightless digital bodies falling down a glass tower.
There is a sharp idea buried here about a corporation that owns a man down to his memories. Ray is a weapon who gets a new tragedy uploaded every time the old one stops working. The film notices this and then walks away from it to stage another fight. Bloodshot has the bones of a story about consent and the body as property. It uses those bones to prop up a generic revenge picture and never looks back.