2020-11-19
$1.9M
132 min
A robotics company vying to win a lucrative military contract team up with a corrupt CIA agent to conduct an illegal live field test. They deploy four weaponized prototype robots into a suspected drug manufacturing camp in the Golden Triangle, assuming they'd be killing drug runners that no one would miss. Six doctors on a humanitarian mission witness the brutal slaughter and become prime targets.
Make no mistake about it. This is a B-movie and should really be judged as such. As a B-movie it is a decent enough movie. It ticks off quite a few of the WTF points that B-movies tend to, well, just do for no good reason. It does tick off one or two good points as well and on the whole I cannot say that I regretted spending a bit more than two hours on this movie.
The story is not really bad but rather overused and predictable. The science, especially the computer science, is written by someone rather clueless when it comes to informatics.
On the other hand the robots are not really bad at all. The look sufficiently menacing but at the same time they look like a concept that could actually work. My two biggest gripes with the robots are that they shoot worse than imperial stormtroopers and their sensor suite sucks. I mean, come on, they do not seem to have anything else than normal visuals and audio. No radar, lidar. Not even thermal imaging for Christ sake!
The characters and in particular their acting sucks as one would expect from a B-movie but it is tolerable. What is less tolerable is perhaps that they have chosen to include another classical B-movie trait. Most of the characters are useless and dysfunctional, screaming and arguing all the time. The two groups of people in the story are totally dysfunctional as groups and the only difference between the good guys and the bad guys is that the latter have a bunch of bona fide psychopaths among them.
As I wrote, the story is decent for a B-movie but overused and very, very predictable. Unfortunately the ending is really crappy. It is like the writer run out of steam and just wanted to get it over with. It is a bit of a shame because the rest of the movie could easily be shortened 20 or so minutes. There’s some rather unnecessary fillers. With that time spent on a better ending this might have gotten a 3 out of 5 stars rating instead.
Verdict, if you are a sci-fi, and to a lesser extent horror, movie fan it is worth watching as a popcorn flick when you have nothing better to do but that’s about it.
