Perhaps this is just coincidence, but it feels like a lot of action movies these days revolve around grown men and their daughters or daughter surrogates struggling to survive. Although rugged and ready to kill, the men involved are also “girl dads”, protectors and nurturers who train their female offspring to fight as hard as any man in order to survive a world they may not be in themselves someday. Obviously there’s The Last of Us and Stranger Things, but also recent Jason Statham vehicle Shelter, the upcoming feature One Mile: Chapter One, and now Worldbreaker, which is bang on trend.
With its sci-fi frame in which monsters called breakers have emerged from the poisoned earth and can turn humans into a second kind of monster (called hybrids), this feels a lot closer to The Last of Us, but with its own weird extra bangs and whizzes. For a start, Milla Jovovich is in it, in a distinctly supporting role as the female general of the human resistance and leader of what’s become a quasi-matriarchal society (because people with Y chromosomes are more likely to be infected). While Jovovich hasn’t got the best range as an actor, the one thing she’s good at, as proved in all those Resident Evil movies, is fighting monsters.
