Director: Brandon Slagle
Year: 2025
Country: USA
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Action/Sci-Fi
Plot:
Stricken with a debilitating form of PTSD, a soldier trying to get his life back in order finds a possible chance at redemption when he falls in love with a mysterious woman and tries to move in on her. When he's repeatedly beaten and left for dead when she's kidnapped by a strange group of thugs, he looks into everything, which reveals that she's a bioengineered recreation of an inventor's wife who passed away, and sets out to save her using his skills.
Review:
This was a fun, if somewhat disappointing, genre effort. The main thing to like here revolves around the martial arts action, which is quite likable on many fronts. Not only is it pretty frequent throughout the final half as he springs into action to save her, but it's all rather fun and enjoyable with the action being choreographed well enough to be immensely impressive. Mixing together stellar multi-person brawls as he attacks various thugs and guards in extended sequences or a lengthy, drag-out fight with the main kidnapper, who displays an equal amount of skills as he does, creates some energetic sequences that showcase everyone involved rather well. They're hard-hitting, dynamic, and enjoyable, which keeps the film moving along during these segments, and with the overall idea of what's going on here giving the characters plenty of depth and emotional resonance, there's a lot to like here.
Otherwise, there's not much to this one that works. While the central idea here gives the romance some depth in terms of what's going on with their burgeoning relationship, helping to ease him out of his pain and grief, it hardly ever moves the film along that quickly. The film takes a while to get going, trying to paint his tragic backstory and the kind of mental illness issues he's facing, which really goes hard in painting him as a sympathetic figure at the expense of action due to the heavy-handed way it comes about. Even the cheesy romance that they go through is a bit hard to swallow with how hollow she feels as a genuine human being, either through filmmaking tactics or other factors that make it hard to connect with everything here in some regard, which lowers it just slightly.
Overview: **/5
Enjoyable for what it is, while still let down by some big factors, those factors that do hold it up are quite heavy and weighted enough to hold it up against some big drawbacks on this one. Those who appreciate this kind of style or who are fans of the creative crew will have a lot to like here, while most others out there should heed caution.
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