The noble John Wick knockoff has become something of an action subgenre, much like the Die Hard knockoff was a decade or two ago. Blackout is Josh Duhamel's turn in the fancy black suit, and it manages to be a nakedly soulless combination of the two, with an amnesia story thrown in for color.
Amnesia is an interesting go-to trope in action media in that it's both overdone and underused. Way too many action stories strip their heroes of their memories because the events of the story are only interesting if they're told out of order. However, amnesia is one of the most nightmarish things that can happen to a person, and Blackout is a great example of how action movies fail to find its inherent horror.
Blackout is about John Cain, a man who sustained a traumatic brain injury while fleeing the scene of an unclear crime. Cain wakes up in a Mexican hospital, unable to remember any aspect of his life. A woman sits by his bed claiming to be his wife, but he has no recollection of her. As Cain recovers slowly, a group of cartel enforcers insists that he has something of theirs. Cain evidently stole some money and hid a briefcase that is of importance to both criminals and cops. When the cartel starts threatening lives, Cain spontaneously wills himself back into action and starts killing people. From there, the film slowly reveals its misguided mess of a storyline, interspersed with the subgenre's trademark action scenes.
First and foremost, Blackout is a John Wick knockoff. Just look at the poster next to the one from the third film, it's almost comical. Countless films boil down to the unstoppable assassin format of Derek Kolstad's runaway hit franchise with a different star in the lead role. Audience members who are just looking for something to tide them over while they wait for Chapter 4 will find a dozen better options on the same streaming service. The action is just about the only thing that a film like this needs to nail, and Blackout misses the mark. It's slow, awkward, unconvincing, and frequently silly in its shootouts and martial arts struggles. Blackout is far from the worst example, but it's utterly unimpressive when compared to even mediocre entries in the same subgenre.
Like a lot of the other John Wick-likes, Blackout comes from a part of the franchise's crew. Director Sam Macaroni is listed as "Additional Crew" on John Wick Chapter 3: Parabellum. As a director, his history is overwhelmingly in internet shorts. His previous film is the 2020 Pauly Shore comedy Guest House. So, not exactly the pedigree of David Leitch, but Macaroni might have had a decent action movie in him. This isn't it, and it demonstrates a complete lack of originality. Blackout doesn't feel like a passion project for anyone involved. It feels like a film made to capitalize on everything popular in the past few decades of action cinema. It's like building a car out of a bunch of engine parts without the slightest knowledge of what those parts do.
When broken down into its constituent parts, Blackout features one central storyline about an amnesiac murdering his way through the cartel and four or five side stories. The film is constantly drip-feeding information in boring scenes that only unveil the story when it's most convenient. John Cain is either a DEA agent or a drug dealer, and that seems to be the only element of his life he cares to figure out. He's so much more interested in whether he's "the good guy or the bad guy" in whether the woman following him around is actually his beloved wife. Contiguous memory is the thing that makes a person themselves, so the fact that Cain is primarily interested in whether he's the hero of the film we're watching fails to convey the stakes of the scenario.
Movies like Blackout come along frequently and fail to move the needle in any particular way. If anyone actually watches the film, they aren't likely to keep it in mind. Ironically, it will be forgotten. This is probably as good a fate as one could hope for. The writing is weak, the editing is terrible, the direction lacks any sort of creative flair, and there's very little to redeem the film's shortcomings. Some believe that bad is the absence of good, and for those people, Blackout is one of the worst films on Netflix. For those who just want some dumb action fun, this will likely disappoint. Everything worth doing in Blackout has been done before, everything else is either boring or depressing.
Let this be a lesson to the guaranteed countless future attempts to profit off the success of the biggest thing in action. Either come up with something to add to the conversation, or be consigned to the pile with Blackout and be forgotten.