Worldbreaker Review

Worldbreaker will be released in select theaters on January 30.

Ah, January. The first month of the year tends to be a dumping ground for bad movie releases, but Worldbreaker, which stars Luke Evans, is a wreck even by those standards. The latest entry from director Brad Anderson, known for films like Session 9, The Machinist, and the hilarious but terrible Shutter Island knock-off Stonehearst Asylum (wait, you didn’t see that one?), Worldbreaker is allegedly a post-apocalyptic sci-fi action film. I say “allegedly” because the movie doesn’t deliver on the action, the sci-fi, or even really much of the post-apocalypse, largely because it’s too bereft of budget or ambition to deliver much of anything.

For the record, Worldbreaker is set in a world where a dimensional rift called “The Stitch” ripped open in the ground years earlier, from which monsters known as “Breakers” have emerged. Breakers are basically alien zombies with spider legs, and want to kill anything that moves and also sometimes do evil laughs while stalking their prey (really). They shrug off bullets, but can be killed by cutting their heads off with medieval swords or axes because, well, I guess it’s cooler that way. The Breakers can also infect human beings through bites or scratches, turning them into “hybrids” that become alien zombies, but without the spider legs. But women sometimes don’t become hybrids for some reason. Men always do. Don’t ask me to explain it.

While the monsters of Worldbreaker are generic and have too many weird rules, they could have at least done the job of being half-decent antagonists in a movie like this… except they’re barely in it. What Worldbreaker is really about is the father-daughter relationship between Willa (Billie Boullet) and, uh, her father (Luke Evans), who doesn’t get a name (?). Dear old dad takes on the role of narrator, combat trainer, and obligatory Joel from The Last of Us stand-in, because you’re legally not allowed to make a post-apocalyptic story now without a Joel-alike. Willa’s mother (Milla Jovovich) is apparently some kind of mighty warrior leading the army into battle against the Breakers, but she is also barely in the movie (and also doesn’t get a name).

If all of that sounds a bit confounding, welcome to my world. Worldbreaker is a bizarre experience, setting up plenty of expectations and delivering on precisely none of them. Milla Jovovich killing monsters with a big sword? Maybe for 30 seconds of screen time. A family drama about barely surviving in a dying world of zombie-like creatures? Not really, since most of the movie is about Willa and her dad living on an island away from the Breakers. Preparing Willa to be a young hero who has to take up the battle in place of her parents? Nope, because the movie ends before that arc can come to any real culmination. What we get is essentially a dull, 90-minute prologue for the hypothetical version of this you’d actually want to see.

For his part, Evans tries to imbue some gravitas into the proceedings through his speeches and stories about great warriors who have battled the Breakers in the past, but it all amounts to descriptions of scenes the audience would rather watch for themselves. Boullet is fine but she is being asked to play yet another rendition of the stock YA heroine that you’ve seen a million times in better movies. And if you were thinking of checking this out because you’re a Jovovich fan, then prepare for disappointment. While she’s made a career out of headlining B-actioners of this exact flavor, the actress is completely sidelined after the first 20 minutes or so, leaving her family to go fight a war with the Breakers that we don’t get the privilege to see. How much room she takes on the poster versus how much she’s in the final product is practically begging for a false advertising lawsuit like the one about Ana de Armas being cut out of Yesterday.

It doesn’t help that Worldbreaker is also a thematically vacant picture. It’s not completely devoid of ideas, but they’re so thinly sketched that it’s hard to give the movie much credit. The gender dynamic of women being somewhat resistant to hybrid infection and therefore being more suited to being soldiers in this society feels like it’s supposed to amount to something, but it fails because we barely spend any time seeing the women go to battle against the Breakers. There’s lip service paid to younger generations needing stories about great heroes so they can have hope in times of crisis, but Willa never goes through a true crisis where she needs said hope, so that doesn’t pay off either because the movie ends before it gets to a real third act, with a cut to credits that is baffling and aggravating in equal measure.

I want to be generous because it’s clear that the filmmakers didn’t have the money or resources to make the movie they really wanted to, but I can only point to what’s in front of me, which is a soggy appetizer for a sequel that will most certainly never arrive.