Review by Logan Kenny
The images and experiences that set off Vin Diesel’s Ray Garrison on his superheroic quest for vengeance are artificial – made in a lab and designed to manipulate him into being a weapon. Garrison is a marine celebrating leave with his beautiful wife in a luxurious hotel, enjoying his time away from the scintillating action that provides him with professional satisfaction. The next mission is inevitable – it always is for men like Garrison – but for now he will enjoy sun and sensuality with the love of his life. They walk down together by the sunlit pier, staring out towards the radiant blues of the ocean, holding each other like these moments are eternal. Then everything goes wrong, as unknown swarms of men invade their room. Ray fights back with great power, chokeslamming an opponent through a toilet and fighting off several nameless adversaries with Vin Diesel’s trademark intensity, but it’s too much for him to handle solo. The intro is like a hopeless boss fight in a video game, a scenario that is impossible for him to overcome, no matter his skill level. The designers have decided that right now, you can’t win – you can struggle as much as you want, but that doesn’t mean anything here. Garrison’s destiny in this moment is to fail, be captured and watch a man murder his wife in cold blood, before being shot in the head himself.
The first time we see this, we buy into the journey wholeheartedly. We see from Ray’s perspective, viewing each part of the equation as real. The loss of his wife, the failure of his fight, everything – we view it as reality. Yet around a third of the way through the film, the truth of the simulation is revealed, and we see these moments over and over again. The words are always the same; the actions are calibrated beyond his understanding. All that changes is the face of the man enacting this suffering. The entire first half of the film is devoted to manipulating the miniscule details of his existence – reducing his life to an intense process to get the results that these people want out of him.
Ray wakes up and discovers that he has been brought back to life by a team of scientists, led by a carnivorous Guy Pearce, who have granted him superhuman abilities as well as his life back. He discovers that his wife is gone again, and becomes fuelled with a desire for revenge. He is given new moments of romance with a sensational Eiza Gonzalez. Ray is faced with the reality of his own new strength during a meltdown, gaining catharsis in being able to tear apart a wall with his fists. All of these things provide him with a new lens on life and guide him subtly towards taking his vengeance out on this murderous motherfucker who took his love away from him, the catalyst in turning him into this new being.
Immediately following this assassination, we cycle through montage of artifice again still, with one of the most notable changes being the assortment of faces tacked onto the murderer’s body They wipe the memory of Ray doing his assassination, of going through all these moments that we’ve experienced collectively, and forces him to experience the loop again. It remains a replica of everything we’ve seen before, only with a new face for him to eviscerate. He evolves from a marine who murders for the military industrial complex into a man who believes he’s killing independently but who is caught in the same manipulation he’s experienced his whole life. When Ray finds out that it’s all a lie – that his wife’s alive, that he’s done all this before – he can’t trust anything. The raw pain he still feels in his chest over her passing isn’t a reality, and yet that feeling will never go away. His relationship with Gonzalez’s KT is innately false, designed by the engineers to motivate him towards bloodlust, but the bliss of floating in the water with her was real. How do you grapple with that dissonance, with knowing it’s not your real life, but feeling it as intensely as you’ve ever felt anything?
The element that makes the initial twist so challenging is how beautiful the first killing is. Vin is coated in crimson as he enacts limitless chaos on vehicles and bodies. Director Dave Wilson has a visual effects background, including work on my favourite film Tron Legacy, and his expertise helps maximise Bloodshot’s aesthetic. The colour grading is so strong and beautiful, with bright reds and oranges blending perfectly with the physical action and CGI. The lighting of non action sequences is clean and pretty, a nice use of artificial lights and he changes up the strong colours depending on tone and location. Despite being significantly cheaper than most films of its kind, Bloodshot makes the most of everything it has and is one of the better looking blockbusters of recent memory.
That’s most evident in this initial display of overwhelming power, with the first utilisation of slow motion being genuinely earth shattering. You can practically feel the bones of the victim crunch as he takes the impact, his ribcage collapsing and shattering as he flings through the hair. The entire sequence is shot like a slasher film, with Vin often not being visible on screen asides from key moments. You see the terror in the eyes of these unprepared soldiers, knowing that they’re no match for this nightmare and that death has reached their doorstep. It feels so visceral on the first viewing that the reveal only minutes later that it was just one of many is jarring. The majority of the sequence takes place on monitors, through the lens of scientists and manipulators inspecting the relentlessness and studying the power of their creation. Garrison’s purpose as a tool never becomes clearer than this moment, there’s never any glamorous moments of his power, just blurry bursts of light on a few TVs.
None of this would be possible without Vin Diesel. While everyone else is good – especially Guy Pearce who is doing the best chaotic evil genius work in ages – no one comes close to the melancholic perfection that Vin Diesel achieves here. Diesel has always been a personally enrapturing performer for me. His social awkwardness combined with intense melancholy has sparked a lot of relatability across my life. Vin’s better than anyone at projecting the idea of cool, whether playing the best street racer in the world Dom Toretto or the best extreme sports spy in the world Xander Cage. Criticisms against Vin often lambast him for for not being as convincing in the action hero role as more conventionally handsome and charming leading men like The Rock. But that’s what I love about the way Vin approaches performance: he’s not always 100% convincing as the best in the world, but that little hesitation before riding into certain danger adds more than he’ll ever get credit for.
Vin Diesel relies on his body, expressing most of his performances through posture and positioning. In a lot of his films, he is entirely focused on defining his characters through movement and stance alone, with Pitch Black probably being the best example. This makes the moments where he slows down – where you see the cracks in his lips and the sadness in his eyes – all the more powerful. Vin is one of the most effective actors in the world at conveying sincere, wholesome love and intense melancholy, often side-by-side. Beneath the muscle bound exterior and the archetypes he’s placed into, he can put more emotion into a single look than are found in entire performances from most actors. He might not be the coolest man of all time like he wants to be, but goddamn it, Vin Diesel is cool and he is better than he’ll ever get credit for.
His performance in Bloodshot accentuates all his strengths, giving him plenty of opportunities to show off his physical attributes, but is the work of his most devoted to emotional expression and particularly line delivery. While he’s definitely had memorable moments of dialogue in other films, Bloodshot is built just as much on his words as it is his eyes and biceps. He’s good in every scene but a few in particular stand out as built off his performance entirely, with the most major moment coming when he’s faced with the reveal that his wife is still alive and in London. After being haunted by the flashes of her final moments before dying, staring at her alive and well is filled with intense joy and cosmic dissonance. The performance gets stronger upon the reveal that much more time has passed than he expected, with it being five years since he was last in her life. The pain in his eyes is the most palpable reaction I’ve ever seen from Vin, he looks like he’s about to break down in tears, overwhelmed by confusion and heartbreak. His shoulders tighten up and he reacts like he did in the chair watching her die, just halted by feelings of pain he’ll never find the power to articulate. All he can say is “I came home, I promised, I always come home.”
There are also little moments throughout that display Vin’s physical prowess, from his body curling up with grief and despair the first time he’s alone after the first resurrection to the way he trucks an overpowered lackie through a skyscraper with a spear. He’s rarely looked as shredded as he does here, with his traps and biceps bursting out of his shirts and the role makes the most of his muscular frame. Vin doesn’t always feel like the biggest man in the industry, but watching his chiseled physique throw around men on the streets of London makes him feel gigantic; he feels like the buff superhero that little kids imagine themselves to be. But Bloodshot also shows that with greater power comes greater psychological toll. Vin is 52 years old, and he’s as fit as you can be at that age, but after a certain point, the stamina and shape it takes to do stunts every scene for months on end runs out – he can’t do all the same shit that he used to do full time. It’s not surprising that he’s made a movie about unlimited physical strength and an indestructible body. When you’ve built your adulthood and self image around being built, there’s always going to be the fear of the time when you can’t keep it going anymore. Age catches up to us all, and the older movie stars are reckoning with that a bit more. With Bloodshot, Vin has made a movie in which for 2 hours, his frame is eternal. Due to Vin’s melancholic nature as a performer, it doesn’t get to be a display of pure wish fulfilment, since Bloodshot is distinctly about artifice and the limitations it inflicts on the psyche.
Bloodshot reminds me most about Vanilla Sky, another movie about a man liberating themselves from a psychologically draining cycle of artificiality, in favour of a world that’s scarier and more unpredictable but one that gives them control over their own existence again. Even with the opportunity to lose all the pain he’s experienced in the real world, settle for recycled trauma and live a fulfilled few days of existence forever, he’d rather risk death and a lifetime of broken hearts and disappointments just for the chance to live his own life. He never got to do that as a soldier, he lost the one person he loved because he was trapped to the system of murder, he has always been defined by institutions that didn’t care about him. Ray doesn’t want to be a tool anymore. He doesn’t want to be defined by the plans that a scientist has for him. He wants to be a human being again and make his own choices, his own mistakes, even if they lead to another premature ending. He wants to choose.
After most of the action is concluded, it comes down to one final beat, the last display of vengeance against the man who started it all. Ray is taking absurd amounts of punishment, his body receiving an amount of damage that even he was not prepared to take, and is faced with the possibility of death if he continues on his warpath. However, he refuses to give up and absorbs all the energy he’s taking into his body and channels it into a positive force, finally able to embrace and understand his new entity as he completes his mission. For a moment, it seems like he’s over, that time has caught up with him. Even if this was the end, it was on his terms. However, he wakes up like he did for the first time in the chamber of hell. This time, the sunlight is coming through the windows and he’s surrounded by the two most important people in his new life. He gets to stand up and go outside, make the choice of where to go and what to do without being guided by amoral authority. He wanders over to the edge of a cliff and stands with the new love in his life, looking at the sun reflecting off of the gorgeous waves and smiles, knowing that he gets to choose what happens now, even if no one knows what lies at the end of the road.
Memory isn’t what defines us completely. There’s something intangible within all of us that transcends circumstance and experience, that truly forges us as individuals. We will all be plagued by our best and worst memories for the rest of our lives, but we are not just the things we remember. Bloodshot is about the process of utilising memory as what it should be: the building blocks that can be used to create your own future, instead of getting lost in the microcosms of the past. It is one of the most healing movies about trauma that there is, focusing on the intense struggles of not being able to trust your own brain, and it’s beautiful that by the end of this, you don’t feel that pain in your system as strongly. You might not be able to escape the damages that have happened to you – you might not be able to forget everything. But hopefully one day, after all the nightmares and agonies and depressive moments, you can breathe, look at the sun, and see nothing but the future ahead.