For the record, Worldbreaker is set in a world where a dimensional rift called \u201cThe Stitch\u201d ripped open in the ground years earlier, from which monsters known as \u201cBreakers\u201d 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\u2019s cooler that way. The Breakers can also infect human beings through bites or scratches, turning them into \u201chybrids\u201d that become alien zombies, but without the spider legs. But women sometimes don\u2019t become hybrids for some reason. Men always do. Don\u2019t ask me to explain it.<\/p>\n
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\u2026 except they\u2019re 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\u2019t 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\u2019re legally not allowed to make a post-apocalyptic story now without a Joel-alike. Willa\u2019s 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\u2019t get a name).<\/p>\n
Worldbreaker is a bizarre experience, setting up plenty of expectations and delivering on precisely none of them.\u201c<\/p>\n
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\u2019d actually want to see.<\/p>\n
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\u2019ve seen a million times in better movies. And if you were thinking of checking this out because you\u2019re a Jovovich fan, then prepare for disappointment. While she\u2019s 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\u2019t get the privilege to see. How much room she takes on the poster versus how much she\u2019s in the final product is practically begging for a false advertising lawsuit<\/a> like the one about Ana de Armas being cut out of Yesterday.<\/p>\n