“Bloodshot” Provides a Bloody Good Time

Bone breaking, wall busting, grunts and punches fittingly describe marine Ray Garrison played by iconic action star Vin Diesel in Sony’s recent blockbuster fashioned after Valiant Comic’s bestselling comic “Bloodshot”.

The “Bloodshot” comic has sold over seven million copies worldwide in several different languages. The series began in 1993 and rebooted for a short time around 2015.

Retired from comic book publishing, “Bloodshot” was released as a full-feature film on Mar. 13, 2020.

The film isn’t all guns-a-blaze and heavy action, it’s also laced with decent humor from Diesel and better humor from his eventual sidekick Wilfred Wigans. Wigans is a computer genius played by Lamorne Morris. Wigans brings a quirky personality to the screen while consistently slurping down Chinese noodles while working or talking circles in coding and science around everyone’s head.

Diesel, for the most part, plays his regular stoic self which plays well for a U.S. marine with little recollection of anything at first.

Eventually, Garrison’s whole world flips upside down by the reality of his wife’s death. Revenge is his motive and he’s got little time for anything else. He’s been resurrected through special nanotechnology which heals his every wound, grants him super strength and gives him unlimited ability to tap into the internet. Garrison fully plans to use his new abilities to enact hell on those whom murdered his only love.

Promising to return to Dr. Emil Harting, the biotechnological genius that resurrected him, Garrison takes off on his plot for revenge.

Garrison soon finds that not all’s what it seems. He’s being used as a weapon, his mind warped for other’s uses, and he’s not going to stand for it.

Interactions between Eiza Gonzalez’s character, KT, enhanced to breath in any circumstance after almost drowning to death, and Dr. Harting, are probably the most in-depth conversations we see about morality throughout the film. Their conversations bring some reasoning to the film and Gonzalez’s character ends up being a bigger plot driver than Diesel for the most of the film.

Director Dave Wilson shows visual evidence of his past riddled with video game effects. For a debut action film, he does well.

Despite some cliché moments found in most action films, several unique fighting scenes and the ideas, the mechanics, the fantasy and imagination behind them, make the scenes fantastical. Some new things, but also some old things that work.

The slow-mo is done refreshingly well in action and healing sequences; not quite as cheesy as it sometimes comes across. The moderate amount of CGI used when Vin Diesel is being pieced back together, is at least fun to watch, if not the most realistic.

Garrison’s never wavering motive towards revenge for his wife, revenge for the lies, revenge for others trying to cause him harm, does cause the character to land kind of flat, but it’s not unrealistic for a character who’s undergone all that Garrison has. And, for all the stoicism brought about by our main protagonist, you get some fun times with Wigans, and other character interactions.

You’ll get lost in the action of the film, kept on your seat for the unpredictable predictable moments, and enjoy it for what it is, an action sci-fi film.

Sony’s attempt to make it a super-hero series may eventually become a thing, but the feeling wasn’t there. Garrison doesn’t feel like a ‘superhero’, even if he did take out the ‘bad guy’. You never really get to know Garrison, but perhaps a further telling of his story will develop him a little more as a character.

Garrison begins with nothing, but ends with friendship on a new road adventure to find who he is.

The film’s got a medium-high budget at $45 million and only brought $9.3 million domestically opening weekend. World-wide sells brought $25 million, breaking a little over their halfway mark. The film’s bound to have a rough time with the recent coronavirus outbreak, so we may see some rebound in the coming weeks as the world returns to normal.

The film’s PG13 rating comes from intense violence, however, very little blood is made visible. Some language is present though not extreme and very little sexually suggestive comments are made.

For its action sequences and some fun surround sound tricks, the film is a definite must-see in IMAX.

With such a captivating film, don’t forget to blink, or your eyes may become bloodshot. Enjoy.