Kill Command

Unsurprisingly perhaps, experienced visual effects artist Steven Gomez’s debut delivers more style than substance. A thinly veiled sci-fi remix, it borrows heavily from the man-fights-otherworldly-menace hits of the late ’80s and ’90s, and glues it all together with a bucketload of video-gamey effects and gigantic, gut-pounding bass drops. You’ll spot the good-robot-gone-bad from ‘Terminator’, the out-of-their-depth marines from ‘Starship Troopers’ and the butch-bastards-shooting-at-things-in-the-woods from ‘Predator’.

What’s missing here is anything fresh or particularly fun. Even the robotic threat at the film’s core – machines created to replace human soldiers – is lazily thought out. They are literally guns with legs, except for their big bad leader, who looks a bit like the robot in ‘Short Circuit’. But while Johnny Five was very much alive, this drab, derivative sci-fi is not.