Crossbreed is a 2019 sci-fi thriller about a team of military veterans in the future sent to retrieve an alien bio-weapon from a top secret research facility orbiting the Earth.
You have to know what you’re getting into already when you decide to watch a movie like Crossbreed, a new sci-fi action flick from director Brandon Slagle. It’s unabashedly a B movie, with all the trappings of such, loaded with awkward dialogue, wooden acting, ridiculous plotting and bad spec– er, well, actually … pretty decent visual effects. It’s 2019 after all. This is a movie that embraces its low grade sci-fi roots and sort of plays it tongue-in-cheek. Sort of. You’ll never quite be sure but hope that it is.
The story takes place well into the future. We’re well past living on Mars, have suffered through a third world war and now live among the stars. Back on Earth, or rather in a space station orbiting it, trouble is brewing. Seems there’s an alien on board that scientists are turning into a weapon. On the planet, the President of the United States (Vivica A. Fox) and her Secretary of Defense (William Baldwin) decide the experiment needs to be stopped and sends a highly-trained group of mercenaries, led by Boss Ryker (Stink Fisher) to get it. Thing is, those in control aren’t so willing to let it go but when the alien, a young woman with biologically enhanced alien stuffs played by Devanny Pinn escapes, it all goes to hell in a handbasket. Or spaceship I guess.
Crossbreed is a bad movie, though I think it wants to be in the best possible way. Characters seem pulled right from the pages of a cheap comic book all speaking lines so weighted with dripping cheese it’ll make you snort. These men are big, broadly defined archetypes with big, broadly delivered words that aggressively ignore nuance (they smirk at the word ‘snatch’ in snatch-n-grab because of course they do). This is epically over-acted, to the point where you wonder if there was some sort of bet on set, and while some of it makes for some laughs, it eventually wears thin. When the end comes, there’s zero emotional investment in the fate of these figures, and the struggle to survive is reduced to an empty all-too-obvious one-on-one that would seem to make little sense.
The mission has them trapped and hunted, à la Aliens and admittedly, the movie has a few fun bits with that even if the budget prevents the whole thing from really doing what the filmmakers want. You’ll never really get convinced by any of it, but in some weird way, it makes it better that you don’t. More money wouldn’t improve any of this. There’s maybe an argument to be made that this is some sort of homage to indie sci-fi video rentals of the early 90s, and maybe that’s just how to take this. There’s no doubt most of the cast did. It’s just too bad the movie couldn’t make it more fun.
There’s an audience for these kinds of movies of course, and I won’t deny that I find myself drawn to these more often than I should (who cares what the score is?). Slagel is ambitious and does what he can with the limitations, knowing the markers he needs to hit for the genre and landing on them with a giant sledgehammer. It’s about as subtle as a Humvee doing donuts in a dew-covered forest meadow. It’s not is what I’m saying. Crossbreed is what it is and you’ll no doubt not be surprised by any of it if you decide to give it a look.