Patrick Hughes puts Alan Ritchson through Ranger training and then sets a giant machine on him. The fights are staged with real skill; the men in them are numbers rather than people, so the hits land and the losses do not.
Patrick Hughes has made Predator with a Ranger selection course in place of the jungle and Alan Ritchson in place of most of the cast. A silent veteran, known to the film only as 81, reports for training, gets shouted at, and is out on exercise when a machine a good deal larger than he is comes looking for his squad. The tagline is “All grit. No quit.”, and that is a fair account of the ambition. War Machine is a decent, unpretentious action picture with one fine chase in it, a first half hour we could have done without, and a cast of men we could not tell apart, partly because the script never tries to help.
The opening stretch is the problem. Jai Courtney’s Squad Leader runs the recruits into the ground, the recruits take it, and Hughes films the taking with the reverence of a recruiting advert. Nobody has a name. The men are 7 and 15 and 44 and 60, and Cappi Ireland puts them all in the same kit, so for a long while the only way to follow anyone is to follow Ritchson, who is not hard to find in a crowd. We were bored, and bored in the particular way of watching people be shouted at for reasons we were meant to find noble. Then the machine turns up, and we sat up with it.
When it does, Hughes is on firmer ground, and so are his stunt team. He stages the action on real locations rather than inside a computer, and Aaron Morton shoots it so the ground under the actors looks like ground. Andy Canny cuts it so that geography holds: a man goes left, and when we next see him he is still on the left. There is a chase, about five minutes long, that is the best thing in the film and among the better set pieces of its kind we have seen lately. The gore is heavy, bodies come apart, and the 15 certificate is earned early. We winced more than once and were not sorry to.
Ritchson carries it, and he carries it mostly by standing still. He has spent several years playing Reacher on television and knows how little a big man needs to do on screen: a pause before answering, a look held a beat longer than the line, and the film has a centre. Hughes and his co-writer give 81 a past that has hurt him and not much else, and Ritchson fills in the rest with his shoulders. Around him, Stephan James and Blake Richardson, as 7 and 15, are the recruits we could pick out by the end. Dennis Quaid and Esai Morales, as Sheridan and Torres, are the only two people in the film allowed a surname. Everybody else is a number, and everybody else is treated like one.
The script, by Hughes and James Maclurcan, who also appears as 23, is where the film stops trying. The machine has no reason we can see for being there beyond killing, and the film’s interest in it ends at how it kills. Dmitri Golovko’s score hits its marks and leaves no tune behind. Enzo Iacono keeps the camp plain; the machine is where the design went. The politics are simple to the point of being a poster: the Rangers are good, training is good, pain is good for you. Several critics have found that hard to stomach. We found it easier, because the film is so plainly unembarrassed about it, but we would not pretend it is thinking.
Hughes’s earlier films, The Expendables 3 (2014) and The Hitman’s Bodyguard (2017), were noisy, cheerful and cut to ribbons. This is leaner and better shot than either, and it is his best staging of a fight by some distance. But John McTiernan’s Predator (1987) is the comparison the film invites, and McTiernan gave each of his soldiers a personality in about five minutes before the hunting started, so that we minded who was being hunted. Hughes gives his men numbers. When one of them is in trouble, we found ourselves checking which number it was.
Watch it with company and something to drink, and give it the half hour, because the second and third acts pay the first one back. It runs 110 minutes and carries a 15, and both feel about right. It is not about anything, and it does not pretend to be, and there are worse ways to lose a Friday evening.
