War Machine review: Alan Ritchson leads a humorless Predator clone

War Machine blends military-recruitment tropes with a Predator-style alien hunt, producing a stone-faced, often humorless sci-fi action film. Alan Ritchson plays the leader of a U.S. Army Ranger squad, while Patrick Hughes directs from a script he co-wrote with James Beaufort.

The real centerpiece is a Transformers-like alien machine that stalks the Rangers; the movie’s many echoes of earlier action films are obvious throughout. The film opens with an Afghan-set prologue in which Ritchson’s character promises to join the Rangers after his brother (Jai Courtney, credited as Squad Leader) is killed.

Fast-forward two years and the narrative moves into a muscular, testosterone-fueled ranger-training sequence in which candidates are identified only by numbers. Dennis Quaid and Esai Morales play the hard-edged officers running the program, and Hughes stages a classic montage of obstacle courses, rain-soaked push-ups and endurance tests.

Afghanistan

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