Misshapenly Clever

I wonder if some critics even really want clever scenarios, or whether they just want pictures that look pretty and are well paced, and, granted, I like pretty, well-paced pictures, too. For "Bloodshot," indeed, is ugly and choppy. Some of the color correction is hideously garish, especially the yellow in some of the exteriors, and much of the picture looks as though it were photographed by a Michael Bay wannabe with some imitation of "The Matrix" (1999) mixed in. The action scenes, down to Vin Diesel's glowing chest and the parkour capabilities of a character with artificial legs and arms, come off as perfunctory. Dialogue tends to be insipid, too, with the camera not even always focused on Diesel's face as he seemingly provides bad ADR for his rejoinders. Meanwhile, computer wizzes are stereotyped as unmanly types amidst all of the machismo, with one of them serving for one of the worst dick jokes I've ever heard in a movie. Somewhere along the way from comic-book adaptation and beneath the superhero, action-junk veneer, however, there's conceptual, reflexive cleverness here. It's one of my favorite kind of movies--one about its own making.

"Universal Soldier" (1992) revenge tale meets the meta narrative construction of Tony Scott's underappreciated "Déjà Vu" (2006), or, say, the time-loop artifice of Duncan Jones's "Source Code" (2011). Or, more precisely, "Bloodshot" follows a thread of reflexive, deconstructed superhero movies we've already seen, namely "Spider-Man: Far From Home" (2019), largely praised because it looks pretty and is well paced, and another underrated, allegedly boring one, "Glass" (2019). By the way, if you haven't seen these three movies yet, you might want to stop reading this review now, as I'm going to talk a bit about how they deconstruct their genre.

"Glass" is the more old-school, following a meta-narrative tradition that may be traced back to comic-book origins with Superman, whose alter ego of Clark Kent and, more so, his coworker Lois Lane, wrote the superhero's story for the Daily Planet newspaper. It's the story-within-the-story, then. "Glass" is about the making of the film-within-the-film, as Samuel L. Jackson's character orchestrates for the supes to perform in front of cameras. Like Superman, however, the conceit of "Glass" is that the fictional metahumans are real in the story. The conflict between reality and illusion takes center stage in "Far from Home," though, where Spidey's powers are "real," but Jake Gyllenhaal's (hey, the same guy from "Source Code," as it so happens) Mysterio's powers are faked through a system of visual effects and projection--like the movie itself for us, the audience. There's a subplot, to boot, that revolves around a shapeshifting species and the same Samuel L. Jackson partaking in a virtual vacation. Clever stuff for superhero franchises.

As for "Bloodshot," everything is manufactured, artificial and enhanced, implanted and dreamed, constructed, photographed and ran through computers. The big twist comes early when the spectator is apprised of the artifice--confronting us with our own supposed suspension of disbelief, as it were. Ultimately, of course, the suggestion is that everything we see in "Bloodshot" is a simulation. I really like the association of cinema with dreams, as Diesel's protagonist dies, or sleeps, before the illusion is placed in his mind. The doctor played by Guy Pearce (another nice bit of casting, as Pearce may be best known for starring in a mind-game film also about manipulated memories, "Memento" (2000)) even reprimands his computer wiz for ripping off movie conventions in his dream constructions. The murderer's dancing to pop music taken from "Reservoir Dogs" (1992) being one of the more obvious borrowings.

So, we have movies as dreams and a movie dreaming other movies. The entire charade, or trick, of the story of manipulating Bloodshot's series of revenge killings is about filmmaking, too. Pearce's doctor and the rest of his team are actors played by actors--pretending characters who are pretending to be other characters (should he fake being a former tennis pro again, for instance), to fool Diesel's surrogate for us, the movie spectator. Moreover, these actors are also the filmmakers. Indeed, one of them is made up of a system of cameras--an otherwise "blind" character, which is kind of apt for a poorly-photographed picture, but I digress. Look at all of the viewpoints framed by diegetic cameras in this one: those by the blind cameraman, but also by computer screens, surveillance video and satellite imagery--and from the mind's eye of Bloodshot's implanted dreams. It may not all be well executed, but it's quite cleverly conceived.

Finally, there's the process by which all of these movies are largely made nowadays, by technology and through computers. All of the action is framed by characters enhanced by fantastical technology and as created by the computer-generated imagery from their computer coders. Movies implanted as memories and action scripted through computers. There's the guy regenerated by nanorobots, risen from the dead like Frankenstein's monster and akin to the life-death-and-reanimation process of film recording itself, from the deathly capturing of a series of still images to the projection of their reassembled motion. He gets into fisticuffs with an arm man, a leg man and the cameraman, but the real battle is played out via computer hacking. It's all a simulation, so it's all about who can better write simulations.

At least someone who wrote "Bloodshot," whether it's the comics, which I'm not familiar with, or the screenwriters, recognized what these movies are ultimately about, although I do wonder what the visual-effects houses that make much, if not most, of what we see on screen make of the junk of turning computer nerds into unathletic, small-penis caricatures who never win the standard prize in such schlock of a female mate (and "Far from Home" does essentially the same thing). The woman in this one, by the way, gets about the least interesting power, too, of being able to breath under water while being subjected to the male gaze and otherwise suffocating under her male master. Moreover, given how much these movies are made by committee, with "Bloodshot" also being planned as part of a franchise, although we'll have to see how much the pandemic shutting down theatres during its release puts a wrench in those works, it's not surprising that even if such superhero fare is conceived intelligently that it ends up looking rather dumb. Look past the simulation, though, and you might see that this was really kind of smart.