Diesel resurrected over and over in new film
Vin Diesel’s twistless and unremarkable new flick will leave audiences wanting something more
I wanted more out of Bloodshot. Much, much more than it was prepared to give.
Vin Diesel stars as Ray Garrison, a U.S. soldier who is killed by an assassin and then resurrected in a scientist’s lab, again and again, memories wiped, programmed to kill. I wanted a computer boot-up noise each time that happened, like a Macintosh after a power blip.
Guy Pearce appears as Dr. Emil Harting, the scientist in question. I wanted his character to be called Peter Weyland, since he’s essentially playing the same misanthropic tech genius as in the disappointing Alien sequels, Prometheus and Covenant.
Movie scientists are always giving their plans too-obvious names. I wanted Project Bloodshot to be called Project First Cow, or Project Extra Ordinary, or even Project I Still Believe. Any of those would work. You think the Manhattan Project was about urban planning?
Lamorne Morris has a small role as Wilfred Wigans, a programmer in the employ of one of Harting’s rivals. I wanted him played by Don Cheadle. If you’re going to hit me with a rubbish British accent, at least give me a better actor doing it.
Garrison is almost invincible because his blood is filled with nanites, microscopic machines that can repair tissue and enhance strength, and which sometimes glow red with the heat of their exertions. In the scene where he fights bad guys in a tunnel covered in flour from an overturned truck, I wanted this combination to result in a cake.
The movie explains pretty much everything about Garrison’s situation, but at no point does anyone say: “It’s like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, if he killed a different guy in Punxsutawney each time around.” I wanted that.
There’s a scene in an elevator — a pair of elevators, actually — where Garrison fights a couple of augmented humans. I wanted the visual effects to look convincing. Bloodshot is Dave Wilson’s debut as a director, but he has 16 credits in VFX, so I don’t think this is too much to ask.
Mexican actor Eiza González plays KT, augmented so she can control her breathing, and thus swim underwater for long distances and avoid any kind of airborne poison. I wanted to film to make better use of her than as minor love interest, enabler of the hero’s journey and sexy swimmer.
If you’ve seen the trailer, you’ve seen the movie. I wanted to be able to make a half-decent pretzel out of the twists. Bloodshot is a pretzel stick of a movie; twistless.
If there was a twist, I wanted it to be that the entire story was a video game being played by Matthew Mcconaughey’s son from the movie Serenity.
Speaking of twists, I know that Bloodshot is an adaptation of the 1990s Valiant Comics character.
But the notion of memories rewritten, and not knowing what is real, is straight out of Philip K. Dick — the sort of thing seen in such adaptations as Blade Runner, Minority Report, Paycheck, A Scanner Darkly, The Adjustment Bureau and (especially) Total Recall. I wanted the movie to play with this idea, or at least hint at it. Maybe in the final scene? No?
I want my hour and 49 minutes back.