Released: 11th March
Seen: 21st July
There was a time, long ago, when Bruce Willis wasn’t just a movie star. He was, without hyperbole, one of the most famous entertainers on the planet earth. He was the lead in Moonlighting, which was a global phenomenon, he starred in absolute classics like Die Hard, Pulp Fiction and 12 Monkeys. Hell, the man made two albums with the legendary Motown records and had a top 10 single with the Pointer Sisters as his backup singers, he was the definition of a global superstar… so why the hell is he still working now when he clearly stopped giving a fuck way back in the 2010s and hasn’t put in a decent performance since… what, Looper? He’s certainly not giving a decent performance in Cosmic Sin, but then again no one is.
Cosmic Sin is a sci fi action film where a bunch of aliens who can control people by making them eat strange goo turn up on a planet and decide to start a war. There’s a bunch of soldiers who try to fight them, something called a Q-bomb and a whole bunch of people who should be better than this turning up to cash what I genuinely hope was a sizable paycheck in order to justify them turning up. I would attempt to give a normal blow by blow of the plot where I give character names and details but that would imply that there were characters in this film and that feels generous.
Cosmic Sin is bad, it’s really bad. It gives off the feel of a student film that was made by that one pretentious rich asshole who somehow knows a few famous people who will turn up to help make his final thesis film, but only for like 2 days. To complete this student film feel, everything looks completely washed out, the only sources of visual interest come from unnaturally coloured lighting and the camera is so shaky that you would swear no one involved had ever heard of a tripod. Seriously, any film student could make this exact film… the catch is, most student films are not meant to be released to a paying audience.
At least with a plot as basic as “there are some mean aliens coming, we should kill them” you would think that part might at least be easy to follow, right? Well, no. Another reason why I didn’t give you a blow by blow is that Cosmic Sin genuinely can be hell to keep up with because it is so badly written. If you’re not bored by the interactions, you’re confused by how it’s edited. Hell, I flat out thought a character had died for about half an hour only for them to go “No, no he’s just been offscreen doing stuff all because we couldn’t afford that actor for longer than one day”. This film isn’t trying to be some surrealist Sci Fi epic like Blade Runner, it’s a big action film with a space element so why is this hard to follow?
Could be that Cosmic Sin is so bland that no one, other than maybe Frank Grillo (who, at this point, is on the list of people who are seemingly incapable of giving a half assed performance) seems to care about anything. Dialogue is spoken with all the enthusiasm of someone booking a root canal, the exposition dumps are quite literally just dumps (shit… I’m saying they’re shit, aren’t we witty around here?).
The characters are so bland that if you put a gun to my head and told me to name a single character in Cosmic Sin I would say “Tell my family I love them”. I sit here perplexed and genuinely trying to find a compliment to throw out so this isn’t just a roast of a bad film but I can’t even suggest the DVD would make good kindling because I don’t know that, I rented it digitally because I wanted to ensure this thing left my life within 48 hours of it entering!
Did I mention that Cosmic Sin, visually, is like a really long episode of the Power Rangers (maybe that’s why Saban Films is handling distribution) because oh my god, I got so many early Power Rangers vibes from the costuming of the main characters to the villains… which, ya know, worked fine in a 90s show made up of offcuts from a Japanese show and extra scenes shot in a desert but when you repeat that exact same look in 2021 in a feature film aimed at adults and your film is not Psycho Goreman… maybe you should just stop right now, thank you very much. Yeah, the costuming looks awful, like it’s about to break at any second. Even the props are bad, one of the guns literally still had the orange plastic tip right on the end and I know this because they pointed it right to the camera for several seconds.
Cosmic Sin is certainly sinful, I’ll give it that. A bland film that somehow overstays its welcome at 90 minutes while also feeling like it’s missing large amounts of important information, every single actor just turned up for an easy paycheck and now the world has to live with this boring tripe in it. Worst of all, it’s just another monument to how far a star can fall within a few short years. I propose we all mail a single fuck to Bruce Willis in hopes that he will eventually have a fuck to give and maybe, just maybe, he’ll start looking like he wants to be an actor again.
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