War Machine is the latest Netflix action sci-fi offering, and it lands exactly where you’d expect it to: somewhere in the middle. Not bad enough to turn off, not good enough to remember next week.

The premise is familiar territory. Earth gets invaded, humanity’s finest figure out the enemy’s weakness, and they exploit it. We’ve seen this before in Battle Los Angeles, Predator, and plenty of others. War Machine doesn’t reinvent the wheel here. It just puts some new tires on it.

Alan Ritchson stars as “81,” an Army Ranger candidate carrying a mountain of grief over his brother’s death in Afghanistan. He’s stoic, enormous, and quietly competent, which is basically Reacher in combat fatigues. If you’ve watched three seasons of that show, this role asks nothing new of him, and he delivers it on autopilot without that ever feeling like a problem. He handles the grief subplot with enough sincerity that it doesn’t feel like pure decoration.

The film’s first act plays like a military recruiting video, complete with obstacle courses, drill sergeants, and enough training montages to make you consider enlisting. Then, about a third of the way through, a giant alien robot shows up and starts methodically dismantling the squad. This is where the movie wakes up. The second act has some genuine brutality to it, and one particular chase sequence actually generates real tension.

The robot itself is an interesting creative choice. A mechanical behemoth rather than a slimy alien means the effects budget doesn’t get exposed as badly, though the trade off is a visually dull antagonist. It lumbers, it scans, it kills. Its compass scrambling trick works as a neat early warning system, a low tech signal that builds dread before the machine ever appears on screen.

The supporting cast, including Dennis Quaid and Esai Morales, are largely wasted in thankless authority figure roles. The fellow recruits exist mostly to die in increasingly graphic ways, with a couple of exceptions.

The ending is where War Machine stumbles most noticeably. The method used to defeat the robot is, to put it charitably, extremely silly. It almost derails everything the second act built up. And rather than delivering a proper conclusion, the film pivots toward franchise setup, which undercuts whatever goodwill the second act built up.

War Machine is competently made, moves at a decent pace, and earns its streaming runtime. It’s a fine Saturday night movie that you’ll enjoy well enough and forget almost immediately. Ritchson is the reason the movie lands at all. Without him anchoring it, the whole thing would collapse under the weight of its own mediocrity.

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