Prime Time: Worldbreaker (2025)

I thought I knew what I was getting into when I decided to press play on Worldbreaker. It looked like a low-budget and dubious sci-fi action movie. It had a main credit for Milla Jovovich. Yes, I've been here before, and I made my choice. Sadly, things were much worse than I expected.

I would explain the slight plot, but I fear that it would send us all plunging into a comatose state. There are nasty wee things attacking humans, and they can infect others with their scratches and bites. It's mainly men who end up transformed though, with women largely more resistant to whatever causes the dehumanisation. Willa (Billie Boullet) is a young woman being protected and trained by her father (Luke Evans), the two of them trying to survive on a small island, all while Willa's mother (Jovovich) is kept busy offscreen trying to lead the fight back.

I don't know what's happened to director Brad Anderson to take him so far from the heights of his earlier works, but I doubt anyone could do much to improve the screenplay from Joshua Rollins. This is lazy and careless stuff, with nobody able to do anything worthwhile with the central idea (armies of women leading a charge against an enemy that is much more harmful to the male population). The two biggest names in the cast are wasted in different ways, there's never any proper tension, and any action and/or bloodshed is hampered by an obvious lack of budget.

Boullet is the lead, and she tries her best with weak material. The performance from Evans highlights just how bad things are, with most of his dialogue so inane and risible that it feels as if it would work better in a spoof of this kind of thing. As for Jovovich, she was clearly available for one or two days, and the film is unable to stretch out the footage in a way that makes her feel like the formidable presence she is clearly supposed to be. Mila Harris plays the other main character, Rosie, but, like everyone else, she's also not really given enough to do.

Worldbreaker is a short film idea that needed much more work to flesh things out fully. Neither Rollins nor Anderson seem to have considered that, and neither of them do even half of the work required to turn things into a worthwhile feature. There's not one element here, from the score to the cinematography and editing, that manages to overcome the inherent flaws of the material, and would discourage anyone else from making time for this. Bad movies don't have to be unenjoyable. Low-budget movies don't have to be bad. This feels like a film made by people who didn't care enough to try and make the most of what was available to them, and they certainly didn't manage to make anything good or enjoyable.

2/10

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