Bloodshot

For a film built around nano-technology and bio-mechanical augmentation, David SF Wilson's Bloodshot isn't particularly interested in how the human experience might actually clash with a cybernetically powered, info-dump, identity. Neither is the film particularly dialled into the finer details of possessing a body that can enthusiastically repair itself, over and over again. Tanked upfront by a dreamy introduction that initially seems to be reaching for Michael Bay Americana but is later revealed to be deliberately awful exposition dreamt up by incompetents, Bloodshot never manages to tune into a mode of storytelling that fully exploits the film's conflicting, disparate, strands.

Bloodshot functions solely at the surface level, failing to dig any deeper on its identikit death squads or corporate megalomaniacs. The film's characters express themselves purely through function, specifically how they are able to nudge the piece forward, towards the next anaemic confrontation. Bloodshot is all grist, no meat. Given that his body is flooded with tiny, fastidious insects that mend every microscopic failing as soon as it happens, it seems natural to expect that star Vin Diesel will be examined in terms of post-human machinery - this film finally delivering on Fast & Furious' dangling insinuation that Diesel is a piston made flesh. At the very least, there's an expectation that we'll see bodies reduced to throbbing, blubbery viscera.

Again though, there's a self-imposed distance between the film's physical action and the fracturing, metaphysical interior of Diesel's growling army man. Although we're treated to views of the vast, crimson topography that pulses away within the newly upgraded Marine, this landscape is bracketed away from non-microscopic pummelling. Diesel's body is barely deformed - never required to visibly knit itself back together from a state of colossal ruin. Damage is only ever portrayed as a cosmetic affectation, a few spiralling lines of flesh code knitting themselves back into Diesel's movie star mug. Consequently, Bloodshot never rises above the level of a humourless, misbegotten vanity project.