Summary
War Machine (2026) is familiar fare, but it looks good enough to sell its large-scale action and is surprisingly earnest under the hood.
I get that now isn’t exactly the time for a jingoistic war movie about America’s best and bravest tussling with some problematic foreign power, so it’s perhaps just as well that War Machine (2026), despite wearing the uniform, is a completely different thing entirely. In actuality, Netflix has paid – and a fairly substantial amount, by the look of things – to see what happens if you artificially inseminate Predator with Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear video games. The ungainly offspring is an impressive-looking, surprisingly earnest, and utterly unchallenging streaming offering that’ll delight genre fans for as long as it lasts and be forgotten about entirely the second the credits start rolling.
The politically unproblematic premise evokes the aforementioned Predator as well as Transformers and other sci-fi properties, but it’s structured a bit like Mel Gibson’s Hacksaw Ridge, with a first act set in a military boot camp and focusing on an aloof but impossibly courageous hero figure before eventually exploding into uber-violence once the action starts. A lot of War Machine is sprung to life with the aid of computers, but the gore has a nasty practicality to it that is part of the fun.
Alan Ritchson plays 81, a hulking, taciturn engineer whose trauma over the death of his brother (Jai Courtney, briefly) has turned him into an unstoppable pill-popping supersoldier determined to “cross the finish line” at Ranger training school in his honour, as per their shared dream. Ritchson looks more like an action movie leading man than anyone who has ever lived, so his presence here is unsurprising, but the role has little resemblance to the brain-over-brawn approach of Reacher or the knowing self-referential comedy of Playdate, both of which happen to be streaming on Prime Video. 81 has a haunted, no-nonsense mode that he never really abandons outside of a couple of very brief moments of camaraderie as he unavoidably bonds with his ragtag team of recruits.
The hook here – teased rather artlessly by a few news broadcasts about an asteroid and some errant dialogue about Area 51 and the like from the team’s resident conspiracy theorist – is that during their final training exercise, 81 and his team come under fire from an extraterrestrial vessel that can transform into a nigh-indestructible bipedal battle tank. From there it’s up to 81 to take control, which he has been persistently avoiding due to lingering guilt, and lead his team to safety, all while trying to figure out what’s going on and warn the wider world of what’s coming their way.
So far, so Predator, then, and to be honest, War Machine never really rises above that imitative level. It has a richer emotional core, granted, especially with its welcome focus on mental health even among the cartoonishly macho, but writer-director Patrick Hughes is a much better visual stylist than a writer. You can see the bones of a more effectively dramatic version of the same movie, but all the pleasure in the finished product comes from its competently staged action and surprisingly crispy aesthetics, which thankfully eschew the gloss or grime of most streaming movies for something a bit more textured.
Granted, a giant mech, however cool it might look, isn’t the same calibre of antagonist as a Predator. It has no discernible personality or sense of inherent honour – there’s nothing like, for instance, the bit when Arnie and gang realised that the Yautja won’t kill someone who’s unarmed – and its offensive options are pretty limited beyond a blue scanner and a red energy weapon that follows it. The action instead starts to resemble something you might find in a disaster movie more than an actioner, with 81 and the crew doing their best to evade and escape a much bigger, more powerful enemy (although there is, granted, a rough equivalent to the iconic “If it bleeds, we can kill it” bit).
But I’d be lying if I said it doesn’t work. The movie’s ample budget helps it to look the part, and considering that looking the part is its only real ambition, there’s little to really complain about. Sure, the dialogue is stilted and hackneyed, you can predict 81’s entire arc from the very beginning, and you’ve seen it all – or at least some version of it – countless times before. But there’s such a thing as a “Friday night movie”, something you throw on after a long week when you can’t be bothered to think too much, and War Machine is as Friday night as movies get.
