Man of War lands its gunfights and fumbles the war around them

There is a way these movies introduce their hero, and Man of War does not skip a single step. Connor (LaMonica Garrett) turns up shirtless so we can read the scars, drinking straight from the bottle, staring at a photo of someone gone, a loaded pistol within reach on the table. He is a soldier who no longer knows how to be anything else. Ninety seconds later the phone rings: Russia has crossed into Ukraine, his adopted daughter Riley (Rosmary Yaneva) has been taken, and he is wheels-up. By minute six he is on the ground. William Kaufman's movie does not believe in warm-ups.

That speed tells you what Man of War is and is not. As a piece of tactical action it is genuinely good, better than most of what shares its budget tier and its straight-to-VOD slot. Kaufman has spent a career staging this exact kind of combat, and he is one of the few directors working who can shoot a firefight where you always know where everyone is standing, which direction the threat is coming from, and what it costs to move ten feet across open ground. The gun battles are crisp and there are a lot of them. The hand-to-hand is stripped down and mean. He frames the war-torn spaces wide enough that the film feels large instead of penned into three warehouses, which is the usual fate of a movie made at this level.

The trouble is everything the movie wants to be on top of that. It is set in a real war that is still going, one the audience has watched unspool on the news for years, and it plainly feels the weight of that. It just cannot work out what to say. There is a quiet scene where Connor offers up "war is hell" and his Ukrainian guide Dany (Andrew Howard) fires back, "then why do you make it your life?" That is the best question in the script, and the film never answers it. It gestures at the cost to civilians and the pull of the fight, then backs carefully away from both, wary of taking a side, and reaches for platitudes instead. Ambition without follow-through still beats no ambition. It is not the same thing as a movie that delivers on it.

The cast does uneven work

Garrett, a regular in Taylor Sheridan's TV universe, is a convincing action lead and a limited dramatic one here. He plays Connor at a single stoic setting that keeps you at arm's length for the whole runtime, which is fine when he is clearing a room and a problem when the film wants you to feel something. Daniel Bernhardt has a wicked time as the sadistic Koniev and pays it off when he and Garrett finally collide late. The real find is Howard as Dany. Usually hired to play a generic European heavy, he gets to be funny, sardonic, and quietly gutted by watching his country come apart, and every scene sharpens when he walks into it. If the movie has a beating heart, it is him, not the guy on the poster.

Where it lands

The reviews have split along a predictable line. Action-specialist outlets like MovieWeb and The Action Elite are calling it one of the year's best in the genre, which is exactly the crowd Kaufman reliably wins over. General critics have run cooler: Midwest Film Journal landed at 2.5 out of 5, and Spectrum Culture wrote it off as tired Hollywood tropes wearing a current conflict as a costume. Both camps are describing the same film. Whether it works for you comes down to how much you need an action movie to mean something versus how much you just need the action to be good.

On the second count, Man of War delivers. At 110 minutes it runs a touch long for something moving this fast, and nobody who has seen a rescue picture will be surprised by a single plot turn. But the shooting is clean, the stakes are legible, and Howard alone is close to worth the rental. Go in for the craft and you get your money's worth. Go in for something to say about Ukraine and you leave holding the same question Dany asked.

BCN Score: 6.5 out of 10.