Intrepid outdoorswoman Sasha (Charlize Theron) has all the physical tools required to weather the Australian Outback, but if she’d spent a little more time indoors — at the movies, specifically — she might have exercised a little more caution in venturing out there. All the threats so vividly established in films ranging from “Wolf Creek” to “The Royal Hotel” are further flagged in Baltasar Kormákur‘s punchily effective survival thriller “Apex,” and with due respect to the venomous snakes and rough-and-tumble rapids that feature along the way, once again they mostly assume male human form.
Played with grinning gusto by a startlingly against-type Taron Egerton, initially affable woodsman Ben is every Down Under psycho you’ve ever seen on screen rolled into one dogged, stocky package: a differently imposing screen presence from Theron’s fearless, khaki-clad glamazon. They’re well-matched, then, for a wilderness cat-and-mouse chase across land, water and some claustrophobic rock crevices, even if there’s never a moment’s doubt over who will ultimately prevail. A return to cheerfully pulpy genre fare after the sentimental diversion of 2024’s Oscar-shortlisted “Touch,” Kormákur’s film doesn’t trade in surprises, but offers more than enough heart-in-mouth action spectacle to compensate.
So much so, in fact, that it feels something of a waste to release “Apex” directly to Netflix — where it will doubtless do ferocious streaming numbers, being an altogether better-made and better-acted adrenaline ride than recent viral hits like “Thrash.” But less than a minute in, as DP Lawrence Sher’s camera vertiginously scales the daunting, wind-lashed rock face of Norway’s famous Troll Wall, instantly knotting the stomach as it forces a look down to the ground far, far below, it’s clear that this film’s natural habitat is the cinema. A full Friday-night multiplex house, preferably, where viewers can shriek in unison with each obvious but effective jolt.
The first such chorus would come in the film’s queasy-making 10-minute prologue, introducing Sasha and rugged Aussie boyfriend Tommy (Eric Bana) in the tent they’ve pitched on the aforementioned, very vertical Norwegian cliff, in the midst of an extreme mountaineering expedition that passes for fun in their world. Or in Sasha’s, at least: In an early heart-to-heart, Tommy admits that he’s slowing down, so you know he’s imminently toast. okay enough, in a subsequent watch-through-your-fingers climbing scene, a harrowing mishap leaves him dead and Sasha racked with guilt.
Five months later, she’s driving alone through the glorious wilds of New South Wales to lay his soul to rest, and patch together her own. For a solo female traveler, it’s rough terrain for a multitude of reasons, beginning with the aggressively leering local menfolk harassing her at a gas station and, later, a remote campsite. Though the more polite Ben makes a chivalrous display of intervening in the first instance, Sasha is still wary enough to resist his friendly overtures, though not his helpfully offered directions. Big mistake. With his regular-dude buzzcut and generally jovial demeanor, Egerton is cleverly cast, projecting a more chipper, can-do kind of masculinity than the type we’re usually invited to fear in such scenarios — until he very much doesn’t, least of all with a loaded crossbow in hand, and the game is afoot.
The rules of said game are simple — kill or be killed, really — and Kormákur and screenwriter Jeremy Robbins make short work of establishing them. As they do of pretty much everything else in “Apex,” which comes in at a fat-free 95 minutes, and dawdles little on its protagonist’s background trauma when there’s more immediate peril to be getting on with. That brisk storytelling economy is a good fit for Theron’s own terse, sinewy performance style. She doesn’t play Sasha as a dull superwoman — her redoubtable fighting spirit still permits human wear, tear and palpable exhaustion — but, as in “Mad Max: Fury Road,” that pragmatic physicality makes for compelling viewing: When she’s getting tossed against rocks or battered by wild currents, we feel the cost to her body.
Egerton, by contrast, gets to grandstand a bit more flamboyantly. Relishing a pivot into outright villainy, he makes Ben the kind of progressively unhinged movie monster you can nonetheless map onto other men you might know — and the idea that many men left to the elements might rot into caveman psychopathy is perhaps the point of “Apex,” inasmuch as Kormákur’s thoroughly in-the-moment nail-biter has any point at all.
For this is, at heart, a proudly pleasurable B-movie lavished with the benefits of A-movie craftsmanship: Sher’s splendid cinematography, alternating National Geographic-scale scene-setting with rollicking, propulsive motion when the chase is on; Sigurdur Eythorsson’s crisply efficient cutting; thundering sound design and stunt choreography to seemingly die for. You won’t remember it long after the credits roll — and are immediately cut off by Netflix’s next algorithmic recommendation — but it’s a happy throwback to a time when more junk-food cinema got to look and sound and feel this good, albeit on a far bigger canvas.
Source: variety.com
