Directed by Baltasar Kormákur (Everest; Beast) — Screenplay by Jeremy Robbins.
Baltasar Kormákur’s Apex is a straight-to-streaming Netflix survival thriller that follows Sasha (played by Charlize Theron), a rock climber who lost her partner, Tommy (played by Eric Bana), in a rock-climbing accident. Some time later, Sasha finds herself in the wilderness of Australia, where she encounters Ben (played by Taron Egerton), a stranger who knows the surroundings like the back of his hand. After he intervenes and helps Sasha from a possible confrontation with two strange hunters, Ben gives Sasha two routes to her desired location, and she chooses the harder one. After kayaking, she sleeps in the wilderness and awakes to see that some of her things have been stolen. She makes her way to Ben’s camp, eventually, and he gives her the supplies she needs. But here she learns that his intentions aren’t good. He takes out a crossbow and gives her a chance to run for her escape, as he now intends to hunt her.
When I first saw the trailer for Apex, I was instantly hooked. I really like Charlize Theron as an actor, and it makes so much sense to cast her as this extreme sports/adrenaline junkie character, as she is believable as both an action star and an in-shape athlete. Then there’s Taron Egerton, whom I’ve been a pretty big fan of since I first saw him in Kingsman: The Secret Service, and the idea of pitting them against each other in a survival thriller just sounded like a really good straight-to-streaming total package. It’s been more than ten years since Egerton’s breakthrough role, and he has since gone on to star in multiple Apple TV+ shows and lead the Elton John biopic Rocketman, for which I felt he deserved a lot more credit than he got. His last straight-to-streaming flick was Jaume Collet-Serra’s quite effective 2024 holiday release Carry-On, which served as an excellent Mission: Impossible or Die Hard audition for the actor, who still hasn’t leapt from relative stardom to being an actual major household name yet, despite the popularity of his breakthrough performance. Apex finds him in the role of the antagonist, and it sees him tap into a more unhinged performance than he has perhaps gotten the chance to play before. Both Theron and Egerton turn in solid work here, with Egerton delivering the most entertaining performance in the film, as he gets the most out of the otherwise relatively generic hunter (and sports a quasi-Aussie accent, which a line of dialogue makes sure to comment on to get ahead of any negative feedback).
Their appearance is the major selling point here. If you want to see consistently entertaining actors headline a survival thriller that more or less hits all the marks it needs to, then you’re likely its target audience. If, however, you desire some originality with your survival thriller, then you may be disappointed by just how predictable and familiar everything is here. There isn’t a plot development or payoff that you don’t see coming in this film. So, you’re absolutely going to be a few steps ahead of the film if you’re actually watching and not just having it on in the background while you scroll through updates on your social media of choice, which, I imagine, is, sadly, how most of these straight-to-streaming releases are consumed for a large group of people. That the film feels unoriginal or stale is the biggest problem for me here, but I also have to mention that other major issues that I have here are that 1) the way the antagonist keeps up with the protagonist stretches the limits of what is believable, and 2) sometimes our protagonist makes some extremely illogical decisions.
Other than the central performers that headline the film, I will say that there were a couple of clearly CG-enhanced sequences that worked pretty well, including 1) the opening prologue about rock-climbing (in which we see Eric Bana make an appearance), and 2) the digitally enhanced long take where we see Theron fall through the woods and into a river violently. I’ll also add that I did appreciate the way the camerawork followed our protagonist through the water, both in scenes where she’s kayaking (and we see water hit the camera as it’s filming her back while she’s whitewater kayaking) and when she’s merely moving slowly through the water for stealth. On the whole, though I enjoyed my time with it somewhat, I found this to be a well-acted but fairly unremarkable, unoriginal, and predictable survival thriller.
5.5 out of 10
– Review written by Jeffrey Rex Bertelsen.
