'Apex' A Review

Apex is an action/thriller about adrenaline junkie Sasha(Charlize Theron), the movie opens with a prologue where her and her husband Tommy(Eric Bana) are climbing the Troll Wall in Norway and he tragically dies. Five months later she is taking a solo trip in Wandarra National Park in Australia. She's warned by the ranger there have been multiple disappearances in the area and she meets a couple locals who are slaveringly psychotic but she's gotta kayak! One of the seemingly nice locals Ben(Taron Egerton) gives her a tip about the best(and secret) place to enter the park. But of course Ben is not a good boy, he is in fact a disturbed cannibal with mommy issues, and what quickly gets going is part Most Dangerous Game part Deliverance.

Theron is one of our greatest living movie stars, she's got a facility for emotion and a dynamic physical presence. But here she doesn't have much room to operate, she never really gets to open up and kick ass, the action is mostly calisthenic(she runs, climbs, kayaks, swims) which she's great at and it looks great but overall the character is overly thin and there's not enough compelling action to keep interest. Egerton goes delightfully big, a little dance sequence that starts off the chase is really fun and weird. So there's some energy to the performance but over time it just kind of peters out. In both cases the talent of the actors outstrips the script relatively quickly.

Visually the movie is incredibly uneven, some great on location shots, some decent studio shots, and some stunningly bad and obvious CG. It's part-and-parcel with the script- tonally confused. It can't quite decide if it wants to be pure action, can't quite decide how much it wants to delve into the emotional context of either Sasha or Ben, the fact they just don't kill one another at multiple points doesn't really track, and just overall it has the kind of patina of Netflix algorithmic compromise about it.

Theron and Egerton put forth incredible effort to make this barely compelling.

Currently streaming on Netflix.

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