Bunker Buster

Rating: 4/10 (24 January 2020)

Like a fast-food meal for the mind, this film is slickly assembled, mildly tasty and composed of utterly manufactured elements that contain only the barest quantity of real nourishment.
Treading over very similar ground to numerous other confinement stories, and positioned as a largely in-name-only sequel to the JJ Abrams' found-footage monster flic, the nudgingly titled 10 Cloverfield Lane has a solid cast, sharply written (if episodic and predictable) script and a clean, stylish look, but - much like the subsequent The Cloverfield Paradox (2018) - in the final analysis it simply can't escape the impression that it is an wholly unrelated story that has been hastily modified and had a title slapped on it to shoehorn its narrative into an contrived franchise relationship with the earlier film.
For most of its length, its an effectively staged post-apocalyptic survival picture; as the possibly PTSD suffering, conspiracy-believing, doomsday-planning survival nut, who rescues/kidnaps and browbeats a young woman and a farm hand who helped him build his bomb shelter, John Goodman gives a fine portrayal of quietly spoken, barely repressed insanity, a bit like a shell-shocked Alex Jones (although with a far greater sense of wounded dignity). The other characters are stock and under-developed but ably served by competent work from Mary Elizabeth Winstead and John Gallagher Jr.
Though very well produced and tightly directed, the film never really gets going; hampered by a limited budget and PG-13 rating, we never get much of a sense of the destruction we're told has been wrought in the world above, aside from one effective sequence where a lone survivor attempts to enter the shelter from above. Having established the claustrophobic setting and ambiguous anti-hero, the film quickly quickly runs out of ideas, and ultimately resorts to an ill-advised action finale - clearly tacked on at the producer's request - which negates much of the previous built-up tension and tips the whole enterprise into clumsy self-parody.
In the end it's neither the intelligent confinement thriller it could have been, nor an imaginative or logical continuation of the Ahbrams picture, but a curious hybrid assembly that adds up to considerably less than the sum of its parts.