Apex review: Charlize Theron gets her own Predator movie

Cinema has a long, loving, emotional relationship with Richard Connell’s 1924 short story “The Most Dangerous Game,” about a rich, jaded big-game hunter who lures people to his remote island and hunts them for sport. That premise is endlessly malleable and updatable, for roughly the same reason studios keep making one shark movie after another after another: Humans consider themselves apex predators, but still wonder what it would be like to be hunted.

The “man is the ultimate apex predator” idea is one clear source for the title of the latest movie in this very specific subgenre. Netflix’s survival-thriller Apex stars Charlize Theron as a wilderness thrill-seeker and Taron Egerton as the local predator hunting her for sport through the lush forests and raging rivers of an Australian national park. It’s a back-to-basics movie with minimal frills, apart from a CG-heavy opening sequence set on Norway’s Troll Wall. And while Apex echoes other wilderness survival thrillers, from Deliverance to Cliffhanger to 127 Hours, it most resembles a Predator movie where all the characters happen to be from the same planet.

Apex opens with married extreme-sports enthusiasts Sasha (Theron) and Tommy (Eric Bana) nearing the apex of their Troll Wall climb as a brutal storm blows in. Anyone who’s seen the trailer can guess what’s coming. So can anyone who’s already seen a movie that opens with a dangerous climb featuring people who love each other. (Say, Fall, Vertical Limit, or, well, Cliffhanger.) What’s important for the rest of the story is how the sequence establishes Sasha’s reckless determination to push past her own physical limits.

Five months later, Sasha is in Australia, heading to a remote area for some solo white-water kayaking, when she runs into some unpleasantly leering, looming local men (of the “Hey, girlie, we’re just trying to be nice” variety), as well as an affable dude, Ben (Egerton), who appears to respect her agency and competence. Again, there aren’t a lot of surprises in who turns out to be the real danger to Sasha. Before long, Ben is hunting Sasha through the wilderness with a wicked-looking compound bow, and a creepy level of cheery enthusiasm for the life-or-death face-off he forces her into.

Apex isn’t really focused on surprises in general. Much like a Predator movie, it’s predictable but satisfying, as it explores the grueling lengths a hunted human will go through to survive. Sasha free-climbs cliffs, swims through rapids, whooshes over waterfalls, and fights Ben up close.

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There are a couple of shocking horror-movie scares and a little startling gore, but this movie is more about long-haul endurance than about any particular jump scare along the way. Also like a Predator movie, it focuses on the ways a hapless victim pushes back against a hunter with superior technology, a stronger physique, and other advantages.

What Apex most has in common with superior Predator movies like Prey, Killer of Killers, and the OG Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, though, is an environment that’s a character in itself. Arguably, it’s more of a character than either of the leads — Theron and Egerton both do committed, exhausting-looking work here, but their characters are story functions rather than fully realized people. The scenery, on the other hand, is gloriously three-dimensional.

Photo: Kane Skennar/Netflix

Director Baltasar Kormákur (2015’s survival thriller Everest) and cinematographer Lawrence Sher (Joker and Joker: Folie à Deux) give Apex a stunning lushness. The movie is packed with deep colors, glorious texture, and striking sequences, plus plenty of drone footage showcasing unspoiled, rough wilderness. Apex’s narrative simplicity (and the fact that it’s a Netflix movie) might lend itself to second-screen viewing, but anyone who lets their attention wander to their phone is going to miss some beautiful footage that makes this story seem a lot bigger than it is.

What most differentiates Apex from a Predator film, apart from the obvious dearth of sci-fi elements, is the lack of focus on ingenuity and table-turning wilderness resourcefulness. Sasha doesn’t build elaborate traps for Ben out of sticks and stones, knap her own spear-points out of flint, or dig and conceal a pit to trap him. She just… endures, taking the damage Ben and the environment dish out, and refusing to submit. There’s never a speech about her biggest flaw becoming her biggest advantage, or similar underlining of the theme: This movie is almost as short on dialogue as it is on deep character work. Sasha is dogged rather than clever, as that opening scene about her refusal to acknowledge her limits implies, but the filmmakers leave that to the audience to take from her behavior.

The “tough character just refuses to die” dynamic makes Apex a wince-inducing string of impressively brutal blows for both main characters, but also means that even at a stripped-down 88 minutes (when you shave off the closing credits), the movie sometimes feels stretched to excess. There are three different long, lovingly detail-oriented sequences of Sasha climbing rock faces. Anyone who wants an illustrated primer of different kinds of grips, uses of leverage, or approaches in a difficult climb will get it here. But narratively there’s only so much nuance to explore in the different ways of getting around natural cliff formations.

Photo: Kane Skennar/Netflix

Similarly, the “plunged into rapids and trying not to drown” moments pile up. And while Sasha does try a few psychological approaches to humanize herself in Ben’s eyes, or avert his assaults, she mostly just glares at her tormentor, trying to burn holes in him with her eyes. It’s a little curious that, given so many decades of both “Most Dangerous Game”-derived movies and Predator movies exploring all the ways to bring innovation to a hunted-human story, screenwriter Jeremy Robbins (The Purge) goes with such a bare-bones, meat-and-potatoes approach.

It isn’t necessarily a problem that Apex almost never colors outside of its subgenre’s most basic lines. It’s an efficient, effective horror movie about the limits of the human body. But it’s almost entirely experiential and in-the-moment, with no deeper levels to unpack or explore, and nothing that makes it particularly memorable once the reveals are all in. It’s a fun watch, but hard to imagine people returning to it for a second viewing — or finding the premise or characters so engaging that they’re hungry for further Sasha adventures. That’s one advantage the Predator movies and “Most Dangerous Game” can claim: In both cases, the first one sparked people’s imaginations, leading to decades of successors and spin-offs. Apex is an enjoyable enough trip, but it’s also a bit of a dead end.

Apex debuts on Netflix on April 24.