While we wait for Alan Ritchson to return as Reacher in the fourth season of the hit Prime Video show, he’s taken a detour to a rival streaming service for Netflix’s new action sci-fi War Machine – available to watch right now – which turns out to be a bit Reacher, a bit Predator and a whole lot of fun.
Directed by Patrick Hughes (who also co-wrote with James Beaufort), War Machine sees Ritchson play a combat engineer who is on his final chance to make it as a US Army Ranger, a dream that he shared with his brother (Jai Courtney). We’ll leave why his brother isn’t there with him out of this, but the movie wastes no time getting to his fate.
What follows in the first act of War Machine could be any other military movie you’ve seen. Now known only as 81, Ritchson’s combat engineer is put through his paces over eight gruelling weeks of intense training and, unsurprisingly, is one of only a few candidates left to take on “Death March”, the intense final stage of selection.
The training exercise soon turns very real though as 81’s team find themselves facing a seemingly-unstoppable alien robotic killing machine, who can track them anywhere and can brutally kill them with one shot. But we’re pretty sure that the killer alien robot also hasn’t met somebody like 81 before, and 81 won’t go down without a fight.
It morphs War Machine into a non-stop chase movie that knows exactly what it is. Yes, it’s ludicrous (check one moment where somebody strapped to a stretcher manages to survive a huge waterfall) and yes it’s incredibly cheesy (check a slow-motion walk to a line that 81 keeps going on about), but it’s exactly the type of movie you’re expecting when you press play on a movie that’s essentially Reacher vs massive alien robot.
What helps is that Alan Ritchson is exactly the type of actor you need to lead this kind of movie, capable of delivering the necessary one-liners and also somehow finding some depth in the one-note character development.
He’s also an exceptional action star and even though 81 doesn’t punch the robot (missed opportunity, to be honest), he sells the intensity of the genuinely brilliant action sequences. The stand-out is a breathless five-minute sequence where 81’s team try to outrun the robot in a security vehicle, but every set piece really hits the spot.
Related: Alan Ritchson’s action sci-fi praised as “relentlessly thrilling”
Will War Machine be the best movie you see this month? Probably not. Might not even be the best movie you see this weekend depending what else is on the agenda. But it is 100-odd minutes of action-packed entertainment that you can enjoy to switch off from the world which makes it an ideal weekend watch.
And really, we could all use a bit of that right now.
War Machine is available to watch now on Netflix.
