INVASION (2025) - Mark Reviews Movies

Invasion, Well Go USA

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 20, 2025

The political backdrop of Invasion is blatantly but understandably phony, as a fictional country attacks two constituent ones of the Netherlands. Nobody wants an action movie to be the cause of increased tension or new hostilities between real states (although such a dumb scenario would definitely fit the contemporary political climate), but that's hardly an excuse for how phony the rest of this military thriller comes across.

The apparent goal of screenwriters Philip Delmaar and Lucas de Waard is to give a sense of what the sudden outbreak of war would look like (Do we really need a movie to show us that at this specific moment in time?). Its scope is expansive, looking at assorted military forces in different locations, teams of characters of different backgrounds and with distinct roles to play, and even a peek inside what figures in the Dutch government might do—or not do—in the face of an assault on national holdings on the other side of the world.

It's too much, really, for the movie to keep focus and for any of these characters or scenarios to really matter. In trying to give us the big picture of their story, the filmmakers have limited everything by way of assorted clichés, shallow characters, and meaningless action sequences.

There is, at least, some sort of protagonist among the sizeable cast in Andy (Tarikh Janssen), a recruit with the Dutch Marine Corps. We meet him during a prologue that introduces no fewer than three different groups of characters and/or settings for what's about to unfold in the Caribbean, including Andy's team of fellow recruits and a Coast Guard ship looking for smugglers on the high seas.

The initial attack, though, happens at a resort on one of the the beaches of Curaçao, as a ship from that fake country fires on innocent people relaxing in the sand. Andy's father, a local man who works at the resort, is one of the people injured in the bombardment, and after failing to finish his training because of a fear of heights that obviously will come into play again before the end of the movie, he's determined to reach his dad.

The war and military officials have other plans and more pressing matters, of course, so Andy and his fellow recruits, Jack (Gijs Blom) and first woman marine Noa (Ortál Vriend), hang out on that ship, waiting for something to do. Conveniently, Andy's brother Judsel (Jasha Rudge) is part of the crew of the Coast Guard vessel, so they get some generic back-and-forth and the even more convenient revelation that Judsel's wife is a pilot who does airplane tours over Curaçao. It's almost funny how small the worlds of these characters are, considering just how many gears the plot attempts to spin.

Some of those other ones include the siege of a Marine base on Aruba, where a diplomat for the rogue nation is being detained on behalf of the United States to be prosecuted for drug smuggling, and the invented country of Veragua itself, where Dutch ambassador Caan (Gijs Scholten van Aschat) finds himself the last one left in the embassy and desperate to flee the country by any means necessary. We're also thrown into a briefing room in the Netherland on occasion, where anonymous government and military officials debate and argue for no particular reason except to let us know that the Dutch military in the Caribbean is pretty much on its own.

All of this narrative jumping around quickly starts to seem like a hollow excuse for assorted action setpieces. There are several firefights at the base on Aruba, where marines run and gun with no real sense of strategy. Inevitably, Andy's comrades are called up for their first official mission to rescue Caan, resulting in a formless game of cat-and-mouse in the jungle, and sure enough, Andy has to get past his disappointment and acrophobia to help his friends. More squabbling, running, shooting, and contrivance result, before a string of anticlimaxes (including a literal war machine of a deus ex machina and a moment in which we discover that a single phone call would have resolved almost every single real or perceived problem at hand) put a quick end to the movie.

Basically, Invasion doesn't feel authentic, either as a hypothetical real-world scenario or a generic action thriller. It's phony through and through.

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