Cosmic Sin (Movie Review)

Every now and then, I find myself drawn towards the occasional B-movie. This is especially the case whenever I see big name Hollywood stars like Bruce Willis or Nicolas Cage attached to such projects. Call it morbid curiosity, but I typically go into these movies hoping for a potential gem, or at least one that might be worthy of the "so bad, it's good" designation. Cosmic Sin is unfortunately neither of those two things.

The movie takes place in the year 2524, after humans have developed the ability to travel to distant star systems. While trying to colonize a seemingly deserted planet, a group of soldiers make first contact with a race of aliens that prove hostile. To deal with the threat of further attacks, a rogue unit of soldiers decide to take matters into their own hands by executing a retaliatory attack on the alien's home world.

Fresh off his appearance in the sci-fi-martial arts hybrid, Jiu Jitsu, Frank Grillo plays Gen. Eron Ryle, the leader of this outfit. He is forced to enlist the help of a man named James Ford (Bruce Willis), a retired soldier who was renowned for his skill and calculative measures. Together, the two men must work to find the coordinates of the alien planet, before the aliens find their way to Earth and launch an all-out assault.

I don't know what I was expecting when I'd decided to check out Cosmic Sin exactly. Definitely not to be bored out of my skull though. For a movie that had been billed as a science fiction action film, I was surprised by just how uninspired that action turned out to be. The movie throws every war movie cliche and one-liner imaginable at viewers, with the hope that their inclusion would somehow mask its unremarkable storyline.

But this only added to my inherent frustration with the film. The dialogue was barely intelligible, filled with sci-fi jargon, and the actors themselves were far from convincing. Bruce Willis in particular looked like he would rather be somewhere else. In a better movie perhaps. His phoned-in performance was matched only by some truly cringe-worthy lines of dialogue. 

All that is to say that the movie was a chore to get through, which is saying something considering its barely 90-minutes runtime. But I guess you could also say that it comes with the territory. This is a B-movie after all. Except most B-movies at least offer some level of fun that make them worth the price of admission, a key aspect that was severely lacking in Cosmic Sin.