Junk food used to taste good. I’m not going to argue the likes of, say, Vertical Limit are especially high-art, but there was an earnestness to its rock-scaling antics that’s all too often missing from the biggest, loudest action thrillers today. Apex, the latest in an ever-rotating assembly line of Netflix algorithmic products, is certainly big and loud. It’s a movie inasmuch as you can see it and hear it. Whether it accomplishes anything beyond that, well…
Baltasar Kormákur certainly has the sauce. Beast had Idris Elba locked in fisticuffs with giant lions. Oscar-shortlisted The Deep ranks among this century’s best survival thrillers. Kormákur is better suited than most for a predator v. prey jaunt through the woods, so it’s all the more surprising that Apex belies its title, settling for glossy, bottom-rung thrills without any spark. Star Charlize Theron, one of this generation’s best, certainly could have used a jolt.
She stars as Sasha, an REI acolyte saddled with the requisite trauma needed to give her inevitable fight for survival resonant juice. Hunky husband, Tommy (Eric Bana), might as well be wearing a morgue tag in the cold open. He’s going to die in the kind of totally unpredictable disaster these movies thrive on to push Sasha toward a solo trip in the Australian Outback, a kind of farewell to her dearly departed Sean Cody day player.
It’s Aussie horror lite at first. Rural, sandy, and filled to the brim with menacing hayseeds whose default state is ambiguous danger. Nice guy, Ben (Taron Egerton, playing against type with mixed results), is a breath of fresh air. Until he reveals he’s a cannibalistic serial killer coordinating his own Most Dangerous Game in the outback.
15 years ago, Julien Gilbey helmed A Lonely Place to Die, and it remains not only criminally underrated, but, ironically enough, the apex of mountainous survival thrillers (presuming there are enough of them to qualify as a subgenre). The choreography was kinetic, the performances raw, and the scale was tactile. Apex has plenty of action as Ben chases Sasha through mountains, ravines, and white-water currents, but it’s all digital sludge, impossible to parse through beyond vignettes of the main players being battered despite little physical evidence when they’re done.
Sasha remains Mac Glammed throughout (wonder if AI is coming for make-up artists, Charlize), and Ben never has the physicality of someone we should be afraid of. That’s not Egerton’s fault, but his hybrid of John Jarratt and Jai Courtney killer attitudes is. It’s a serial killer caricature, the kind of uniquely cinematic, larger-than-life pantomime of otherwise dangerous people.
I don’t mean to rag too hard. As a collective (including screenwriter Jeremy Robbins and cinematographer Lawrence Sher), Apex is at the apex of filmmaking know-how. The troupe has put in remarkable work before. It’s unfortunate that Apex stinks of weekend throwaway streaming. It’s loud and colorful enough to pique interest, and there’s just enough movement on-screen to create the impression that, yes, this is a movie with Big Stars. And for a week, that will be enough. Until the next thing thrashes around on the streamer. It’ll be even bigger and glossier. A shiny thing we can all watch, tweet about, and promptly forget.
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