I say "better than average" as someone who for the most part does not like superhero movies. I find them all way too predictable and seeing as how there have been so many of them in recent years you could say that I am sick of them. My disdain for them reached a pinnacle with the release of Captain Marvel which wasn't only predictable but featured a hero so absurdly overpowered that I don't really know where we can go from there. Of course the movie did very well because Marvel and to a much lessor degree DC have figured out that the Asian market is going to come through and result in them making hundreds of millions of dollars on anything they release.
Bloodshot is a super-hero movie, but I would say that it is quite a bit better than almost all of the ones we have seen in the past two years for a number of reasons.
This film did poorly at the box office but that isn't because it is a bad movie, it was because of the date of release. By late March most of the world was already in some form of lockdown and going to the movies wasn't something that many people were even allowed to do, let alone encouraged to do.
The story is admittedly about what you would expect from a superhero film: Ray Garrion (Diesel) is a Marine in an elite strike group that is so good at what they do that not only do they succeed in their operations but they are so confident in their abilities that they do their missions in a joking fashion and basically dominate their opponents. This part of the movie is so typical that it is almost boring despite having a some quite good action with a very in-shape Vin Diesel.
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Cool guys don't look at explosions, they turn their backs and walk away
After the mission the baddies are able to get a one up on Ray Garrison by finding him and his wife on vacation and then the baddies create a need for revenge on the part of Ray in a manner that I will not spoil but I'm pretty sure you can guess seeing as how it is the beginning for at least a dozen other similar films.
What happens later is that Ray is rebuilt kind of like a Bionic or 6-million dollar man situation. Ray doesn't actually believe what they are telling him he has been made into, but as he slowly starts to realize his powers, they are presented in a very cool way but are also limited in the sense that it seems a bit more realistic and something that perhaps technology could actually achieve in our lifetimes. He can't fly or shoot lazers out of his eyes or anything stupid like that but he is considerably stronger than a normal person and he heals almost immediately due to the changes that science have made to his body.
[src](https://postywood.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Bloodshot-2020-Action-Adventure-Movie.jpg)When he does take damage via gunshot or whatever, I found the CGI that shows how he recovers to be some of the best-looking CGI I have seen in any superhero film and that is saying a lot since the budget of this film is about 1/4 of what the average DC or Marvel film would have.
His eventual opponents start out as his friends and once again they are all "super" in the sense that they have been altered in some sort of way using scientific breakthroughs that are realistic enough that they seem like something obtainable in real life. This realism and lack of any sort of mysticism makes these particular superpowers more palatable for someone like me that appreciates a bit of realism in their films, even superhero films.
I suppose it was only a matter of time before other more minor comic book companies got involved in the big time, so to speak and Valiant Comics is a rather unknown compared to Marvel and DC or even Image (if they are still a thing, i honestly don't know) but since they have a decent depth of characters that most of us aren't already intimately familiar with it could be the birth of a decent 3rd party.
Critics ripped up this film in their reviews but once again there is a massive difference between the professional and audience scores on things like Rotten Tomatoes.
I have felt for a long time that the professionals are in the pockets of the major studios and they prove time and time again that I might be correct about this.
Should I watch it?
I give this one a definite "yes" because as super-hero movies are concerned it is the one I enjoyed the most over the past year or so. It ends the way you think it would and honestly the trailer gives away entirely too much of the overall story. However, on the way to the obvious conclusion that exists in basically every superhero story, there are a few twists that your likely didn't see coming, and that makes the journey worthwhile.
