Half military recruitment film, half Predator reboot, War Machine is such a stone-faced, lizard-brained action extravaganza that men may feel extra hair growing on their chest as they watch it. Netflix, famous for how finely it parses potential audiences for streaming releases, was probably compelled by its almighty algorithm to target Alpha males who watch movies on leg day while double fisting Red Bulls with their laptop perched on the hood of their Humvee. These folks are best equipped to enjoy this humorless slab of sci-fi action that’s equal parts every movie you’ve ever seen about a small group of over-matched but resilient humans fighting an unstoppable alien threat.
In this case, the humans are U.S. Army Rangers and their leader is played by Alan Ritchson, in another shaky attempt to follow in the footsteps of previous genre heroes like Arnold Schwarzenegger. Not helped by director Patrick Hughes’ boo-ya script (co-written by James Beaufort), Ritchson comes across as more of an anonymous action hunk than someone who can elicit our sympathies. But the star of the show is really the Transformers-style alien robot hunting down Ritchson and his fellow Rangers in a film that, if you can stop rolling your eyes at how self-serious, formulaic, and derivative it is, winds up being fairly absorbing.
War Machine lifts so many ideas from other, similar movies that should James Cameron, John McTiernan, and others feel so inclined, they could probably piece together a class-action lawsuit against the filmmakers. Then again, they might find themselves glued to the chase scenes and gruesome kills, which Hughes directs in muscular, straightforward fashion without a hint of a discernible style. But getting to the action clichés means wading through the military clichés that get War Machine rolling. Hughes (The Hitman’s Bodyguard and other terrible movies) sets some generic emotional stakes during an Afghan-set prologue in which army mechanic Ritchson promises to join the Rangers with his bro-tastic brother (Jai Courtney, credited merely as Squad Leader), who is killed moments later in a Taliban ambush. Fast-forward two years, and Ritchson’s character, still haunted by his inability to save his brother, moves ahead with his plan to go into Ranger training.
In either a nod to how anonymous red shirts tend to be in these movies or a confirmation of the film’s lack of originality, the cannon fodder Rangers are only referred to by their number. But being assigned a number means surviving weeks of grueling Ranger training led by army big shots played with an almost comical level of ’Murica-first, clench-jawed ultra-seriousness by Dennis Quaid and Esai Morales. The cowards among us may actually appreciate Hughes’s Ranger training montage, which includes candidates running through obstacle courses while getting blasted with fire hoses, doing push-ups in the pouring rain, and jumping into the deep end of a pool with their hands tied. Despite the scar on his knee and his reliance on pain pills, Ritchson’s character makes it through and is christened 81. He, along with this fellow numerically named Ranger candidates, is tapped for the final test: a live simulation that involves hiking through rough terrain to find a classified down aircraft.
The Ranger training is so brawny and testosterone-fueled that when a suspicious asteroid starts making the news, it almost feels like a different movie. Luckily, it’s a slightly better movie, or at least one that keeps us consistently engaged, despite knowing that we’ve seen a dozen versions of this story told with more style and humor, if not as much gore. When 81 and his squad happen upon a bizarre-looking aircraft, it’s not the classified ship they’re assigned to find but rather an alien combination of a Cybertron from Transformers and a Recognizer from the Tron series. It’s an imposing, pretty cool creation that’s hell-bent on killing them all, and Hughes has no compunction about showing Rangers gruesomely impaled, dead on the ground with their intestines hanging out, or getting holes blown into their chests. The violence is striking, yet it sets consistently high stakes, even if none of the characters have a modicum of personality, save the panicky 15 (Blake Richardson), a blatant copy of Private Hudson (Bill Paxton) from Aliens.
DP Aaron Morton’s (Black Mirror: Bandersnatch) digital-crisp lensing includes beautiful shots of forests, rivers, and rocky terrain (the exteriors were mostly shot in Victoria, Australia) — quite a peaceful backdrop for Hughes’s ever-escalating and solidly mounted action scenes, as 81’s dwindling squad tries to escape this well-armed and relentless (dare we say it?) Terminator. 81’s efforts are further complicated by trying to ferry the wounded 7 (Stephan James) back to base to compensate for failing to save his brother two years earlier.
The gargantuan-looking Ritchson conveys about as much emotional depth as a character in a CGI cut scene, which is more attributable to the primitive script than the Reacher star’s abilities. He showed more range, including the charm necessary to climb the action-hero ladder, in his 2025 Prime original, Playdate. So War Machine, in all its loud, chaotic, and generic glory, won’t improve his odds of becoming the next Schwarzenegger or Dwayne Johnson. But on the strength of its recycled sense of hard-charging, mindless purpose, it will suitably entertain the type of man with a gym in his garage.
- Release Date
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March 6, 2026
- Runtime
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107 minutes
- Director
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Patrick Hughes
- Writers
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Patrick Hughes, James Beaufort
- Producers
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Todd Lieberman, Alexander Young, Patrick Hughes, Greg McLean, Rich Cook
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