Apex review:
In director Baltasar Kormákur’s ticking clock thriller Apex, Charlize Theron plays Sasha, a strong-willed woman who thrives on living on the edge. The film wastes no time to establish that Sasha is a thrill-seeker, someone who treats a mountain fall as a minor trip and fall accident on the sidewalk. However, a tragic event forces her to give up mountaineering and try kayaking, albeit in water bodies with a strong undercurrent. When she goes to an Australian location for newer thrills after a tragic incident in her life, a man named Ben chases her with a staunch determination to finish her off. Apex sets itself up reasonably well for a battle between its tenacious protagonist and her feral predator. However, the film eventually succumbs to genre trappings. The film follows the hunter-becomes-the-hunted trajectory to a T, making it feel less like a survival thriller and more like a checklist of tropes.
The visuals are stunning, and the cinematography and the music do the heavy lifting to bring some tension to the proceedings. Charlize Theron and Taron Egerton also deliver competent performances, making their complex feelings and emotions palpable. Theron marries Sasha’s resoluteness with vulnerability. Sometimes, you can look at her face and feel exactly what is going through her mind. Theron has such expressive eyes that convey the internal monologue of her survivalist character more than the dialogues. Egerton, too, puts in an unhinged performance as a man baying for blood, offering a stark contrast to his performance as a hapless TSA agent navigating an airport hostage situation in Netflix’s own Carry-On. Unfortunately, the screenplay lets the actors down considerably.
Director: Baltasar Kormákur
Cast: Charlize Theron and Taron Egerton
Streamer: Netflix
Even if you somehow overlook the fact that the plot is wafer thin, the script sometimes does not even trust the actors’ ability to convey the few thematic layers in it. For example, when Ben tells Sasha that a penchant for an adventurous life has made it hard for people like him to “function in polite society,” she tells him that she understands where he is coming from. This itself establishes that, while they may have different proclivities (one uses violence to cause harm, the other uses it for defense), Ben and Sasha are two parts of the same coin; only, one is deranged and the other damaged. Having established this, it appears a case of spoonfeeding when the makers verbalise Sasha’s impressions of Ben’s personality. We get the point: trauma has stripped him down to the version of a man who operates on his most primal, predatory instincts.
Another factor that does not land with the necessary effect in Apex is the act of Sasha finally coming of age as a person through her life adventures. This arc serves as a metaphor for how well she overcomes the curveballs that life has thrown her way, but it is bereft of emotional heft. You feel the same sense of numbness when Sasha finally makes it out alive, so much so you wonder whether the film could have been better off eschewing the romantic angle that contributes to the arc. By the way, Sasha coming out in flesh and bone is not a spoiler. Rather, it is the most obvious outcome in such a story. All in all, even if you go in with bare-minimum expectations, at best, the film serves as a showreel for the performers that Theron and Egerton are and a showcase for the natural wonders of Australia. Unfortunately, the film is not quite the 'Thunder Down Under' its premise promises to be.
