There’s something deeply comforting about a movie that knows exactly what it is. War Machine doesn’t pretend to be elevated sci-fi or a meditative treatise on artificial intelligence. It’s here to drop you in the wilderness with a squad of Army Rangers, unleash a skyscraper-sized battle droid, and let the bullets – and biceps – fly. And honestly? Bless it for that.
Yes, we’ve seen killer robots before. We’ve seen alien invaders. We’ve seen elite soldiers picked off in the woods. But Patrick Hughes’ latest doesn’t try to reinvent the circuitry. Instead, it leans into the glorious, high-decibel tradition of late-’80s and early-’90s macho action cinema, the kind where sweat glistens, trees explode, and nobody whispers when they can shout.
The first half plays things relatively straight. We’re introduced to a fresh batch of Ranger recruits grinding through selection under the command of Alan Ritchson’s stoic unit leader, known simply as 81 – his number in the program. The training montages are as crunchy and satisfying as you’d hope: mud, blood, barked orders, reluctant camaraderie forged through exhaustion. It’s standard stuff, sure, but it works. Hughes shoots it with a tactile grit that makes you feel the weight of every pack and the sting of every fall.
Ritchson, who’s already carved out a modern action-hero niche with TV’s Reacher, doubles down on his granite-jawed authority here. But there’s a hint of something heavier beneath the muscle. His emotional distance from the recruits isn’t just archetypal hard-ass behaviour; it’s tethered to a past incident involving his brother (Jai Courtney), a trauma that lingers like smoke over the narrative. The film doesn’t wallow in it, but it gives 87’s silence an edge. He’s not just barking orders – he’s containing something.
And then, mercifully, the movie detonates.
When the mechanized menace arrives – a towering, bipedal war machine that looks like Robocop‘s ED-209’s angrier, gym-obsessed cousin – War Machine shifts gears into full-throttle survival mode. Whatever that thing is, as 81 bluntly puts it, it’s hunting. Whether extraterrestrial relic or rogue AI experiment, it doesn’t matter much. What matters is that it stomps, it scans, and it obliterates.
The second half is where Hughes indulges his inner 12-year-old, and I mean that as a compliment. The action is loud, violent, and occasionally splattered with just enough gore to remind you there are stakes. It’s unapologetically testosterone-fuelled, echoing the spirit of Predator and the kind of video game bravado you’d associate with Metal Gear-style military fantasy. The difference is that it rarely feels cheap. A surprising amount of the film is staged on physical sets and in real terrain, and that grounded texture separates it from the usual green-screen blur that clogs so many streaming action flicks.
It looks slick. Not glossy in a sterile way, but sharp and muscular. The forest becomes a battleground you can almost smell – damp earth, gunpowder, sweat. Hughes, who once delivered the lean and mean Red Hill before going Hollywood with the bombastic Hitman’s Bodyguard films and The Expendables 3, clearly understands the rhythm of chaos. He knows when to let a scene breathe and when to unleash a hail of bullets.
Is it subtle? Not remotely. Is it original? Debatable. But originality isn’t always the point. Sometimes you just want to watch highly trained soldiers try to outwit a relentless death machine while delivering gravel-voiced declarations about survival. Sometimes you want a movie that understands the primal pleasure of an impossible enemy and a last stand in the trees.
War Machine is big, loud, occasionally ridiculous, and fully aware of it. It’s a high-volume time killer that doesn’t apologise for its influences – it practically flexes them. And in a landscape crowded with self-serious sci-fi and algorithm-approved blandness, there’s something refreshingly honest about that.
Strap in, switch off the part of your brain that demands plausibility, and enjoy the carnage. Sometimes, big dumb fun is exactly what the mission calls for.
THREE AND A HALF STARS (OUT OF FIVE)
War Machine is now screening in select Australian theatres before streaming on Netflix from March 6th, 2026.
