I could not finish it. That is where I have to start because it is the most honest thing I can say about Apex. I got roughly an hour in, I looked at how much time was left, and I turned it off. Life is too short and Netflix has too many other things on it.
You have seen this film many times before and every time you saw it, it was done better than this.
Apex is a survival thriller about Sasha (Charlize Theron), a grieving adrenaline junkie who travels to the Australian wilderness to scatter her husband's ashes and ends up being hunted by a psychotic killer named Ben (Taron Egerton). That is the film. That is all of it. You have seen this film many times before and every time you saw it, it was done better than this.
Nobody Is Trying
This is the thing that gets you. Not just that the film is bad. Bad films happen. But that nobody involved appears to care even slightly. Charlize Theron gave us Mad Max: Fury Road. She is physically committed here in the way she always is. But commitment to the physicality is not the same as being present in the film, and Theron looks like a woman running through a very long day of shooting a Netflix film she agreed to before reading the script properly.
Taron Egerton as the villain has been given absolutely nothing to work with. No motive, no menace, no character. He is a face that occasionally appears to threaten Charlize Theron. That is his entire role. Eric Bana shows up and then disappears. Why is Eric Bana in this film? What did Eric Bana think he was doing when he agreed to this?
It has all the markers of a real film: a real director, real stars, real locations, real cinematography. It just feels like nothing.
The Netflix Problem
Apex is exactly the kind of film that the algorithm greenlit and the algorithm will recommend and the algorithm will decide was a success because forty million people pressed play in the first week, many of whom turned it off after twenty minutes. It has all the markers of a real film: a real director, real stars, real locations, real cinematography. The Australian landscape is genuinely beautiful, which makes it more depressing that it is serving as the backdrop for something this vacant. Lawrence Sher, a genuinely talented cinematographer, shoots it well. Nobody can say the film does not look good. It just feels like nothing.
The script is the problem at its core. There is no character development because there are no characters. Sasha is grieving and tough. Ben is crazy. The film does not want to go any deeper than that, so it does not. What remains is ninety-five minutes of a woman running through beautiful scenery being chased by a man we do not understand or fear. Baltasar Kormákur has made good films. Everest is gripping. Adrift worked. This feels like a film he directed with his eyes closed.
Why Was This Approved
That is genuinely the question. Somewhere a meeting happened. Somewhere someone read this script and said yes, let us spend a lot of money on this, let us give it two real stars and a real director and send everyone to Australia. And nobody in that room said: but what is the film actually about? What does it want to say? Why does it exist? Those questions do not seem to have been asked. The answers, if they had been, would have been: nothing, nothing, and it does not.
The Verdict
Apex is one of the worst films I have seen this year. Not because it is incompetent. It is not. It is worse than incompetent. It is a completely empty film made by talented people who are clearly elsewhere in their heads.
I turned it off. You do not need to turn it on.