Perhaps this is just coincidence, but it feels like a lot of action movies these days revolve around grown men and their daughters or daughter surrogates struggling to survive. Although rugged and ready to kill, the men involved are also “girl dads”, protectors and nurturers who train their female offspring to fight as hard as any man in order to survive a world they may not be in themselves someday. Obviously there’s The Last of Us and Stranger Things, but also recent Jason Statham vehicle Shelter, the upcoming feature One Mile: Chapter One, and now Worldbreaker, which is bang on trend.
With its sci-fi frame in which monsters called breakers have emerged from the poisoned earth and can turn humans into a second kind of monster (called hybrids), this feels a lot closer to The Last of Us, but with its own weird extra bangs and whizzes. For a start, Milla Jovovich is in it, in a distinctly supporting role as the female general of the human resistance and leader of what’s become a quasi-matriarchal society (because people with Y chromosomes are more likely to be infected). While Jovovich hasn’t got the best range as an actor, the one thing she’s good at, as proved in all those Resident Evil movies, is fighting monsters.
But given she’s busy saving the world, she’s the more distant parent in this set-up, leaving husband Luke Evans (known only as “dad” in the same way that Jovovich’s character is only called “mother” or “mom”) to raise and protect their adolescent daughter Willa (Billie Boullet). Dad and Willa end up escaping to an uninhabited island where they try not to starve given how little food is around (global warming and natural disasters have taken their toll). To pass the time and prepare for the inevitable final showdown, dad makes Willa run a homemade obstacle course, just like Hopper and Eleven in Stranger Things. It’s as if, in the future, the model parent is the pushy coach type of dad who’s obsessed with stopwatch timing and protein intake, like all those over-invested fathers you see on the sidelines in sports movies, egging their kids on like their own lives depend on it. Only here, dad’s life does sort of depend on Willa learning how to decapitate breakers and hybrids.
Pondering what all this means in terms of contemporary concepts of masculinity is much more interesting than the film itself, which feels very much like something lifted wholesale from video game culture, with thinly plotted side quests and more worldbuilding than necessary, which effectively starves the main A plotline of energy. There are lots of stories within stories told by dad, many about someone or something called Kodiak who might have been a hero or a bear or both, but whose relevance to this story isn’t sufficiently established either way. At least Evans has his own bearish charisma and an empathic, paternal chemistry with young Boullet, a young actor who is definitely one to watch. She has an interesting mix of gamine vulnerability and wiry physicality that might take her far.
Worldbreaker is on Prime Video from 7 March.