Bloodshot is an unexpectedly intelligent and patient sci-fi film. It spends its entire first half persuading us that it's just another dumb action movie, and right when we're convinced that that's exactly what it is, it pulls the rug out from under us and reveals that it was all just a ruse before establishing its true premise, and it does this with such skill that we can't stay mad at it for having fooled us so thoroughly. It's like one of those Russian dolls, only instead of having another, smaller doll inside, it has is a much more complex and satisfying movie.

All we see up to the halfway point is utterly generic, and Bloodshot knows it (“You've already copied every movie cliché there is. I think “Psycho Killer and a lunatic dancing in a slaughterhouse is enough”). Vin Diesel's character is a Frankenstein monster made from parts of Neo, Robocop, the Universal Soldier, Wolverine, and the T-1000.

After conveniently listening, just once, to a trigger song, he regains his lost memory – and not in bits and pieces; like Celine Dion, it's all coming back to him now. Without even a training montage in between, Diesel employs his many new skills so expertly that he exacts revenge on his and his wife's killers with over an hour left to go.

What Bloodshot does is take the expression 'a pig in a poke' and turn it 180 degrees. Director David S.F. Wilson and screenwriters Jeff Wadlow and Eric Heisserer aren't really copying action movie clichés but playing with them – subverting them for their own benefit, and the audience's as well. I was so pleasantly surprised that I'm willing to look at the silver lining on a couple of things.

1) the hero is an indestructible, unstoppable one-man army, killing machine – i.e., same old, same old except that Diesel, unlike many contemporary action heroes, has an actual personality and can be introspective. 2) a sequence towards the end, where the protagonist fights a couple of baddies, deliberately looks like a video game cutscene, but it's still better than watching someone else play a video game. And 3) there are the dreaded comic sidekick and romantic subplot, but the former is tolerable, and the latter is subtle and unintrusive.

All things considered, Bloodshot's biggest flaw is that it's supposed to be the first installment in a series of movies set in the Valiant Comics shared cinematic universe (oddly, though it's based on the character Bloodshot, that name is never uttered in the film; I imagine they're leaving it for the inevitable sequel, as well as the merely hinted at romance between the male and female leads). The first movie in a franchise is almost always the best of the bunch, but Bloodshot is good on its own.