War Machine

War Machine. Reacher guy Alan Ritchson stars in this decent little variation of Predator style story telling. He's a Army combat engineer. He's old but has a desire to make it into and through Army Ranger School. I'll just cheat and tell you he ends up in Colorado at Ranger School. We get an Aliens Space Marines awakening crossed with Starship Troopers boot camp setup and meet our eventual action squad full of standard characters. Lucky for us when they show up at the school they leave names behind and are identified only by the number on their patches. 15 is an asshole. Stuff happens. Dennis Quaid shows up and does his tough commanding officer thing. Weird thing is he's only a Staff Sargent. No officers around? Don't know. Strange choice. Esai Morales is his second in command. He's his usual smart cool badass. I find it kind of funny that his running buddy in Bad Boys back in the 80s, Clancy Brown, was the training Sargent in Starship Troopers. Is there a joke there?More stuff happens. We reach a crisis. Now here we go. Training mission. Go out in the wilderness on some trick flying Blackhawks, gorgeous photography, achieve some objectives and come back inside the time limit. Oops. This movie just changed gears and they are running for their lives. It's pretty goofy, yet pretty good. You've seen this all before, but it's a fun little ride, like the rollercoaster at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk. Alan Ritchson makes this work. He's basically Reacher at the beginning. Dude has that magic little charisma thing. Sometimes he can make a cheesy scene just work, he just turns the up empathy dial. VFX are ok. Things happen some more. There are weird details that stuck out for me. Like when there's a cutaway to the hands of two bros while they bro out. One hand is bloody. The other is wearing a glove. These folks have been training for weeks. They've been crawling up and down mountains. Blown in the dirt. This fucking glove looks like it just came out of a bag with a receipt on it. Happens a couple of time. This stuff bugs me. Anyway. Nothing game changing. Predictable, yet amusing. Under 2 hours. I'd rather watch this than that dumb movie Predators with Adrien Brody. It's an okay time if you like this sorta stuff. Recommend. Streaming on Netflix.