Worldbreaker

Very few actors elevate low-budget action cinema like Milla Jovovich, who is front and center in all of the marketing of Brad Anderson’s latest genre endeavor, Worldbreaker. Her face is even nice and big on the poster. Sadly, the marketing is dishonest: Jovovich has little more than an extended cameo in the dystopian horror-action film. The marketing department can’t be blamed, however, because, well… there is very little in Worldbreaker worth advertising. 

A lifeless montage of AI-looking stock footage and expository narration sets up the world: monsters, called “breakers,” emerge from cracks in the ground, and a group of women warriors, in a strange conglomeration of medieval armor and modern weaponry, stand between humanity’s survival and extinction. The breaker’s bites infect people like zombies, except men are affected at a much more dangerous rate than women. Jovovich is one of those warriors, as expected, and must leave her husband (Luke Evans) to care for their daughter, Willa (Billie Boullet), alone. (The parents are so dryly written that they don’t even get names beyond Willa’s mom and dad.) They flee to an island temporarily free from the breakers and pass their time running drills in preparation for an attack.

Willa’s father tells her stories about a mythical man named the Kodiak, supposedly the first person to kill a breaker. He found out that only a good beheading will do the trick, and that somehow makes him important. As he parrots the tales, he insists the story is powerful; it needs to be preserved, not unlike the Bible in the Hughes brothers’ The Book of Eli. But it’s all ultimately a lifeless tale without theme or dramaturgy. Perhaps Willa’s father missed the part about important stories also being good ones because the stories we hear of the Kodiak are about as inspirational as the posters in corporate HR that say “Achieve!” in a fat font situated over some mountain in Chile or Nepal.

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