Alan Ritchson, who you might have seen in the Prime Video series Reacher (pictured above) and who is co-starring with Henry Cavill in The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, has signed up for undergoing more elaborate fight scenes on the big screen.
According to Deadline, the actor will star in the upcoming action sci-fi film, War Machine. The title suggests what kind of movie this might be, and the logline—the only other piece of information we have about the plot—supports this conclusion.
Here’s the logline, complete with its grammatical snafus: “In the final 24 Hours of the world’s toughest selection process, a team of Army Rangers encounter a threat beyond their imagination.”
This is a sci-fi movie, so I bet a dollar that this “threat beyond their imagination” is aliens and/or a rogue Artificial Intelligence bent on killing us all. Ritchson is undoubtedly one of those Army Rangers who encounters something beyond the scope of his comprehension and, most likely, does everything he can to murder it first. This is all speculation, of course. Time will tell if I’m right.
War Machine comes to us from Patrick Hughes, the director behind The Hitman’s Bodyguard, a 2017 action comedy film starring Ryan Reynolds and Samuel L. Jackson where Reynold’s character, a disgraced CIA operative, has to protect Jackson’s character, a hitman about to testify in a trial, from other hitmen trying to kill him. That film earned a 44% Rotten Tomatoes score and Hughes’ 2021 sequel, The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard, chalked up a 26% critics rating, though the audience scored it better at 79%.
The comedic slant to these films makes me curious whether War Machine will also take that approach. I’m more interested in it if it does, as that tone would be more intriguing and less well-trodden than a grim tale about how some incomprehensible threat is set to destroy us all.
Hughes along with James Beaufort wrote the script for War Machine. The movie is produced by Lionsgate and will make its way to Netflix at some point in the future.
