Main cast: Frank Grillo (General Eron Ryle), Bruce Willis (General James Ford), Brandon Thomas Lee (Specialist Braxton Ryle), Corey Large (Dash), Perry Reeves (Dr Lea Goss), CJ Perry Barnyashev (Sol Cantos), Lochlyn Munro (Alex Locke), Costas Mandylor (Commander Marcus Bleck), Adelaide Kane (Corporal Fiona Ardene), Eva De Dominici (Captain Juda Sayle), Sarah May Sommers (Lieutenant Hoyt), and Trevor Douglas Gretzky (Felix Zand)
Director: Edward Drake
Set in the 26th century, Cosmic Sin sees humans traveling to space and setting up colonies on other planets in the Solar System. Naturally, this leads to an alien invasion, as folks from the Siega galaxy decide to infect and take over humanity’s conscience to assimilate them into the superior race.
The government officials debate as to what to do, so General Eron Ryle decides to launch Operation Cosmic Sin on his own, bringing together a band of military specialists to form a tactical strike team. Who has time to wait for fat officials to debate and dither while people are getting abducted and assimilated out there!
Ryle also enlists the disgraced James Ford, whose bright idea to just nuke some human rebels was successful but also brought some really bad PR to the government, and now, the Dirty Dozen… oh wait, I only count 11 of them. Anyway, the gang is ready to take down alien ass.
Now, if I had my way, I would switch the roles played by Frank Grillo and Bruce Willis.
Mr Willis gets a lot of screen time here, but he’s easily the weakest link of the entire cast, as he’s just phoning in half the time and looks somewhat confused and lost the the other half the time. Yeah, yeah, he has aphasia, blah blah blah, but come on, innocent people are being subjected to his lackluster acting, so there is only so much pity one can throw his way.
Frank Grillo, on the other hand, always looks like the perfect military action hero, he has the gravitas and screen presence, and he has… very minimal screen time here, having had his suit malfunction and him being shoved off stage for the most part as a result. I can only sigh because Ford’s role calls for some feels and emotions to make it work, and Mr Willis just isn’t having any of that actual acting stuff here.
As for the rest of the cast, they are sort of there. Their characters, like Ford and Ryle, are straight out of the handbook of military movie stereotypes, and there is nothing much done here to make them even halfway interesting or memorable. Oh, some of them will die, but meh, who cares? I don’t know them, after all, they are just… things on the screen.
The story is also clichéd through and through, right down to the really played out “kill the leader, and the rest just falls” trope, and I can only wonder whether the two people credited as screenwriters really wrote this thing or it was just the two of them coming up with prompts for an AI program to churn out the script. The whole thing is so, so been there, there that, bored already.
There is nothing memorable or noteworthy about this spectacularly unoriginal and banal movie, so my recommendation is to just skip this thing and go watch something, anything else.
