‘Bloodshot’s Flour-Based Action Sequence Is a Real Waste of Flour

Bloodshot, a Vin Diesel starring action movie based on the Valiant comic books of the same name, originally hit theaters on March 24 and immediately got destroyed at the box office thanks to theater shutdowns in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. It was subsequently released early for purchase on VOD, on March 24, which means those of us cowering in our homes — sorry, sheltering in place — could watch Vin’s action hero in all his dumb, fun glory.

And Bloodshot is dumb and fun, exactly the sort of pleasantly retro escape I, and I assume many others, needed right now. Directed by first timer David S. F. Wilson, Bloodshot wears its influences on its sleeve: Wilson noted to The Hollywood Reporter that he grew up loving Roland Emmerich, Paul Verhoeven, and watching “every movie Tony Scott ever made.” While Bloodshot lacks the epic scope of Emmerich and the biting social commentary of Verhoeven, it does have Scott’s slick style and the action sequences do look very cool; some extremely dodgy CGI aside.

Only problem is the movie’s stand-out action sequence wastes a lot of flour that I could really use at home right now.

In the movie — and spoilers for Bloodshot here — Diesel plays Ray Garrison, a soldier who watches his wife get killed in front of him by a villain named Martin Axe (Toby Kebbell, vamping it up delightfully in a pretty much nothing role). Ray is also killed, then brought back to life by Dr. Emil Harting (Guy Pearce) who fills his blood with nanites, tiny little insect-like computers that repair his body and turn his brain into a supercomputer. Now Vin doesn’t just live his life a quarter mile at a time, he lives it a quarter gigabyte at a time. You know what, lemme workshop that one and get back to you.

Anyway, at first Ray doesn’t remember anything from his previous life, until a night of drinking with his fellow super-soldier KT (Eiza González) jogs some memories free. Ray grabs a car, then a plane, and heads off to go kill Martin Axe, which is when the flour-wasting action sequence comes into play.

Axe, surrounded by elite soldiers protecting him, is trapped in a tunnel by Ray when the latter slams an entire flour truck into Axe’s convoy, spilling flour everywhere. The soldiers immediately fire up some flares, and what you get is a stylishly lit/staged action scene crunching through flour with red lights everywhere, like if John Wick attacked a bakery.

My issue, which I realize is a very specific issue for this very specific time, is that I was hoping to turn off my brain for 109 minutes; and instead was reminded that every grocery store within walking distance is completely sold out of flour. When Axe’s car is completely covered in flour, and he uses windshield wipers to sweep some of it away, I was hoping I could grab some of that to make pizza dough. Every time a soldier crunched their way through the flour-strewn tunnel, I frowned picturing all the lost pancakes and muffins. The cheeky moment where Ray scrapes a happy face in the flour on Axe’s car window before shooting him several times didn’t make me cheer for the death of a villain; it made me sob over the lost banana bread I won’t be able to make for weeks, until this quarantine ends.

The funny part is, Wilson didn’t even use real flour for the sequence, which means that panicking over a waste of good flour is probably the most realistic emotion elicited by Bloodshot. The digital release of the movie — it’s currently available on iTunes, Prime Video, Vudu, Google Play, and FandangoNow — comes with a bunch of extras.You’ll get the requisite blooper reel (watch Guy Pearce flub a line! see Vin Diesel’s Chap Stick applied!), deleted scenes including a gruesomely mean “alternate ending” that thankfully did not make the final cut, and several behind the scenes featurettes.

In “INITIATE SEQUENCE: Directing Bloodshot,” they dive into the making of the tunnel sequence, revealing that though most of the production was filmed in South Africa, and instead of shutting down a real tunnel for two weeks, they built one. Vin Diesel also filmed his own stunts for the sequence, which is why it probably works so well, to be honest (versus the climax, which is like watching a PS2 video game cut scene). They also discovered that flour will catch on fire very easily, so given all the flares the soldiers were using, the production subbed the ground wheat out for something else. They don’t specify what it was in the behind the scenes feature, but if I find out it’s a combo of hand sanitizer and Lysol wipes I’m going to lose my mind.

Look, I get this may not be the same reaction for everyone. Maybe flour is only a rare commodity in kid-heavy Brooklyn, where everyone is desperately trying to fill their children’s time with stress-baking cookies and cakes. It’s also one sequence in a movie that is more focused on twisting Ray’s memories into a pretzel and looking very cool while introducing a series of increasingly macho/ridiculous characters for him to square off against. At that, it succeeds, particularly thanks to Sam Heughan’s sneering fellow soldier/bad guy Jimmy Dalton and Lamorne Morris as tech dude Wilfred Wigans (in the bloopers he accidentally calls himself “Winston” after his New Girl character and it’s very cute).

And for most of the runtime, Bloodshot is a silly ’90s throwback, a comic book movie that pays lip service to its source material (the comics are very good, by the way) but is mostly concerned with hot babes, cool stunts, and making the star look very rad. That’s exactly what I want out of a movie right now, and for 100 of those minutes it’s a satisfying way to unwind. For 9 minutes, though, you might find yourself wishing Vin Diesel would have saved at least a cup of that flour in between bashing heads.

Where to stream Bloodshot