It’s not so much that Apex is not a good movie, it’s that it’s beneath the talents of someone like Charlize Theron. While Baltasur Kormakur’s film, which debuted last week on Netflix, reveals itself to be more than just an exploitation-adjacent story of a wronged woman getting revenge on her scumbag tormentors, there’s no doubt that’s the category where you’d file it in the cinematic pantheon. And that does acquaint us with an unfortunate truth: Now that she’s into her sixth decade on this planet, it may be that slightly elevated genre fair is where we’re more likely to find Theron than her previous A-list work. (Just to be clear, you are into your sixth decade when you turn 50 years old. Don’t want my phrasing to inadvertently age Theron up.)

It’s not like there are not some other A-list elements in Apex. Theron’s co-star here is Taron Egerton, who isn’t the household name Theron is, but who did play Elton John, and has established himself as a pretty reliable leading man. And Kormakur himself has fully declared his credibility in the action/thriller genre with, most notably, Everest, not to mention the really fun Idris Elba vs. a lion movie Beast from a couple years ago. Apex just doesn’t find any of these people quite at the apex of their careers.

Kormakur’s past filming mountain climbers is definitely relevant to the opening of Apex, in which Theron’s Sasha finds herself sleeping in a tent lashed to the side of a snowy rock face, some number of hundreds of metres above the ground. The tent’s co-habitant is her husband, Tommy, played by Aussie legend Eric Bana. Except for the fact that it’s Eric Bana, we know this sort of opening is going to end in tragedy for his character. And lo and behold, even though it is Eric Bana, it isn’t long before he’s off the side of the mountain, leaving Sasha with psychological wounds – and a need to return to Australia to spread Tommy’s ashes.

The bulk of the story picks up in the outback, where Sasha seems to have gone as much for the high-intensity canoeing through dangerous rapids as she’s gone for the ash spreading. The opening incident may have cured her of her urge to climb mountains, but not her thirst to seek thrills. But the thrills may not come in the form she hoped, as innocent exercises like stopping for petrol put her in the path of some pretty wretched samples of humanity in the form of a pack of hunters with seriously damaged senses of empathy. You know, the type of Aussie men who respond to their attentions being rebuffed by telling her they’re just trying to be polite, in that tone that’s dripping with the sadism within their souls.

Fortunately, there’s a lone wilderness type, Ben (Egerton), who may have her back. Ben’s the only one who will venture a word that perhaps the lady is doing just fine, thanks guys. When some of her things go missing after another run-in with the hunters, Sasha comes across Ben’s encampment, now needing supplies to make it through her own intended stay in the bush. It may be that Ben is the only one who will help stand in the way of the predators who are hunting her.

The fundamental setup of Apex is too obvious by half, but without getting into too many details, let’s just say it doesn’t stay that way. This is something other than the wilderness version of I Spit On Your Grave, where a wronged woman picks off the men who wronged her one by one. There’s more of an emphasis on survivalism and less of an emphasis on repeating the exact narrative beats of a movie we’ve seen dozens of times before, and that really would be too far beneath Theron at an age when she hasn’t yet shown a wrinkle.

One thing that elevates the material is Kormakur’s really advanced skills with the technical side of action filmmaking. This isn’t only apparent in the sort of rough-and-tumble, eye-gouging style fisticuffs that need to be part of any movie where desperate characters are at each other’s throats. No, there’s real ingenuity to the staging of these action scenes, including one where a character tumbles all the way down a hill and into a rushing river, all in one (apparently) continuous take. There’s also a struggle between Theron and one of her assailants in which they are essentially chained to one another with a length of cable, meaning that one can never get sufficiently away from the other and must resort to a close quarters methods of subduing each other – or put each other through the same natural gauntlets and hope you survive while the other doesn’t.

So yes, on a level of pure genre excitement, Apex impresses. It falls down a little bit in other areas, in ways that could have been avoided. Obviously Theron is our protagonist and there isn’t a moment of doubt that we’re aligned with her character. This means that we want her to emerge victorious on her own terms, not due to her adversaries flubbing some kind of advantage they had. Yet flub they do, such that there are a number of times when she would have been dead if their only goal were to kill her, thereby ending the equal threat she poses them. That she gets to live through these moments of her tormentors’ advantage is not quite the same as villain grandstanding and speechifying, but it’s close enough to leave a sour taste in your mouth. Our ideal Sasha emerges from this because she outsmarted adversaries who were doing their damnedest to kill her at their earliest opportunity.

These are not the sort of complaints that stick to Apex as a genre movie that’ll get your pulse pounding on a Friday night, or any other night in which you are seeking a pounding pulse. It’s just that Apex had the opportunity to break the mould a bit more than it ended up breaking it, making it a solid but not a memorable achievement.

 

Apex is currently playing on Netflix.