Joel on Film

The pieces of Apex are simple, spare and straightforward, and under the direction of Baltasar Kormákur, that combination is just right for a number of reasons. So many thrillers—even, sometimes, ones with a premise as basic as the one here—overly complicate their plots with a lot of nonsense that it’s refreshing when a movie seeks to get in, do its thing with a modicum of style and get out while the getting’s good. We grasp the basic humanity of the put-upon heroine by the ten-minute mark, and we receive a villain who is simply and undeniably the villain, with no interpretation that can suggest anything else.

Since all these pieces are so ably connected, the entire puzzle that’s created here works, and even if it works for extremely basic reasons, the fact that it works cannot and should not be dismissed for the minor quibbles and observations along the way. For instance, once we receive those basic pieces of information and experience the event that incites the plot, there’s only one direction in which any filmmaker or studio would really allow a film like this to move. In other words, everything here is blatant in its predictability.

Would we want it any other way? In a movie that pits a woman, grieving a grave loss, against a bona fide psychopath whose depravity constantly finds ways to deepen, why on earth would anyone want the ending to sicken them? No doubt, there is a place for movies of exactly that nature, but in terms of providing a bit of nasty-silly fun with only place to send its two central characters, we can rest assured that Kormákur has not made one of those movies.

A brief prologue sets the stage for Sasha (Charlize Theron): A recreational sports junkie who especially loves climbing treacherous mountains, she and her husband Tommy (Eric Bana, good in an extended cameo that haunts the rest of the movie) have made it to Troll Wall, which really is a north-facing rock located in Norway. These are the type of climbers who also set up camp in tents pitched precariously on the sides of the rocks they climb, and during one such attempt, well, let’s say things don’t end well for Tommy. Five months later, Sasha finds herself at Wandarra National Park in Australia, her late husband’s home continent, to spread his ashes in a spot established as a memorial for the missing and presumed dead.

Theron is a thoroughly capable actress, and obviously, she sells us on Sasha’s fragile emotional state in the wake of a death for which she feels responsible. It’s an annoyance, then, to encounter a bunch of jeering men along the way to the memorial spot, asking impertinent and sexist questions about their own assumptions about her. Seemingly, she’s saved by the handsome and kind Ben (Taron Egerton), who offers some help—which she rebuffs—in getting her to where she needs to go.

Obviously, there’s something wrong with Ben, who winds up being quite a bit worse than any of the other douchebags who use only their words to torment. He pops up at random early in Sasha’s journey, and after reeling her in a bit with banal words and a nice personality, he reveals his true mission: He’s going to hunt her until she can no longer fight back, at which point he’ll put her out of her misery. The rest of the movie, then, is an extended chase between a capable woman in foreign territory and her terrifying pursuer, who—we learn through the various revelations about the extent of his terror—knows this park very, very well.

If Theron is a capable actress in conveying the emotionality of this character, we also already know that she become the resolutely badass heroine of an action-thriller set in and around the rapids of a river. On the other side of the coin is Egerton, who is having an absolute blast as a completely insane, truly cuckoo-bananas villain who has zero other characteristics. Nothing about his performance is subtle or even nuanced, and since the actor knows that, he barrels forward admirably.

Again, there’s only one direction in which Kormákur and screenwriter Jeremy Robbins are taking this story, and it’s exactly where we want to go in this case. The appeal of Apex is in getting to that point with tightly wound thrills and a solid showcase for two actors who know exactly how to play this familiar but propulsive material.

Rating: *** (out of ****)