Action Hero MoviesFrom the outset this movie appears to be glorifying human-machine symbiosis — probably as part of an agenda to push robotic transhumanism, and to pre-condition people into accepting military robots, and by extension, police robots. Not only do its big robots look like the giant power ranger robots, they also act like them — taking human form and being controlled from within.
Credit where it’s due though, it’s quite entertaining, with a memorable action scene pretty much from the outset. Although that credit is shortlived as what started as a cool action scene turned into an irritating horror scene – not because it’s scary but because it’s incredibly irritating in an attempt to distress the viewer with constant screaming, near-black screens where you think there may be a problem with your device’s brightness but there’s not, and continuous jumpy flicking footage. Very skippable — and I recommend you skip that attempted trauma — if you know the gist of what happens due to having seen it before.
Downsides aside, this movie does a pretty good job at sustaining attention and being mildly entertaining — building up to a nice combat training scene between the lead male and the lead female around 40 minutes in — thus far attention hasn’t slipped much, but the highs have also been quite limited, so it looks set for a score just Above Average. By 90 minutes in, I’m still set on an Above Average rating. The action is quite good from time to time, and the story and acting is generally not bad, although it is regularly cringeworthy. So although there’s not much excellence in this movie, it sits just above par for the most part. One of its strengths is in maintaining consistent engagement which is just as well since it’s over 2 hours long.
While it is quite engaging, the extended final action scene is a bit of a massive scriptless shout-fest. Not pleasant and highly skippable in short jumps if you’ve seen it before and can’t be wasting energy on that kind of garbage even if the CGI-assisted visuals look convincing and the actors are doing a fair job at what they’re told to do. If not for all the shouting and the severe lack of substance to the interesting concepts at the end, on top of the shallow heights of the best parts throughout, I would probably rate this movie Above Average, but as it stands, I think Bang Average is fair.