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PEOPLE & ARTS Saturday 14 March 2020
Review: Vin Diesel in

the bruising ‘Bloodshot’

By JAKE COYLE to be as much a film direc- to make for themselves
Associated Press tor as a mad scientist, com- strange new lives. Along
It might be too harsh to rec- piling digital worlds and the way, a few actors give
ommend practicing social plot lines for his creations. it a pulse. Eiza González,
distancing with the new (“It was all a simulation” has as the also-enhanced KT,
Vin Diesel movie “Blood- officially replaced “It was is compelling enough that
shot,” but I wouldn’t want all a dream” in the movies.) the movie feels like it should
to shake its hand, either. And there is somewhere in have gravitated from Gar-
David S. F. Wilson’s film here a salient metaphor rison to her. Lamorne Morris
comes not from Marvel or for the plight of soldiers re- just about steals the movie
DC but the pages of Val- turning home from war with as the brilliant but goofy This image released by Columbia Pictures shows Vin Diesel in a
iant Comics. Its central prosthetic limbs and forced coder Wilfred Wigans.q scene from "Bloodshot." Associated Press
character, a former sol-
dier named Ray Garrison
(Diesel), is brought back
to life with nanotechnol-
ogy that gives him super-
human strength and the
ability to immediately be
healed by microscopic
robots. He awakes to a
muscleman’s dream, lift-
ing enormous barbells and
trading a punching bag
for a concrete pillar. What
could be better? Well, the
downsides include the
haunting memory of the
murder of Garrison’s wife
and the eventual realiza-
tion that his creator, Dr.
Emil Harting (Guy Pearce,
classing up the joint), can
turn him off with a switch.
But when he’s in action,
Garrison is something like
a hulking Terminator who
rapidly reassembles when
shot or exploded, just with-
out the sunglasses or snap-
py catch phrases.
There’s a dull thud to
“Bloodshot,” a bruising ac-
tion movie that can’t equal
its brawn with brains. It’s a
high-tech “Frankenstein”
that cobbles together the
sci-fi concepts of various
previous movies before
it. Wilson, a visual effects
expert making his directo-
rial debut, films the actions
sequences in a vague,
disorienting blur, some-
times slowing things down
in shots of grim brutalism.
One, in a darkened tunnel,
is shot amid a crimson glow
and a clouds of powdery
white (from a flour truck).
Diesel doesn’t bring any
dramatic heft to the part
but he makes a mean bul-
let of a man. “Bloodshot”
is, at least, a little more in-
teresting than it initially ap-
pears. It begins to reflect
back on itself, questing
what’s real and what isn’t.
Pearce’s Harting turns out