COSMIC SIN (2021) ½ *

This is another Bruce Willis DTV flick.  Unlike the usual down-to-earth actioners he’s been cranking out, it’s a sci-fi/horror hybrid.  It’s sort of a mix between Doom and Ghosts of Mars, and although the set-up had potential, much of it is just dreary and dull.  

In the future, man finally makes “First Contact” with alien life.  The aliens possess a couple of astronauts and turn them into space zombies who spit blood and infect others.  It’s then up to Frank Grillo and Bruce Willis to stop them.  

Cosmic Sin isn’t one of those Emmett/Furla productions Bruce has been starring in lately.  Even though it was made by a different company, he does even less here than he did in many of those cheap-ass movies.  He’s in it for a little bit in the beginning, but his character conveniently disappears for a good chunk of the running time once the action switches over to a forest planet.  Grillo gets the shorter end of the stick, if you can believe it, as he spends half the movie drifting alone in space.  But hey, anything to keep him from interacting with the other actors, right?

Some amusement can be had from spotting the clever editing used in the early scenes to make it look like Willis and Grillo are in the same scene together (they never appear on screen at the same time), but that can only carry this inept sci-fi slog but so far.  Willis does appear alongside his other co-stars, Corey Large (who also wrote and produced) and Brandon Thomas Lee (the son of Tommy Lee and Pamela Anderson Lee!), if only fleetingly.

This has to rank as Bruce’s worst.  I mean stuff like Color of Night is bad, but at least it’s got style.  This looks chintzy and haphazardly put together.  It makes Asylum movies look like blockbusters in comparison.  While the initial standoff between the humans and aliens is OK, it quickly goes into the shitter and never looks back.  I was hoping that once Bruce and Frank hopped into their snazzy mech suits (they look like a cross between the suits in G.I. Joe:  The Rise of Cobra and Edge of Tomorrow), the show would finally get on the road, but once the dramatic focus shifts to the supporting non-stars in the cast, Cosmic Sin becomes a cosmic bore.