Apex

Baltasar Kormákur’s Netflix action flick is not going to change the world. In fact, if you’ve already seen any number of other wilderness survival movies – Cliffhanger, The River Wild, Deliverance, and yes, Up – it’ll already feel like a familiar world, despite its spectacular array of Australian torrents, precipices, ravines and menacing bogans in pick-up trucks. But it’ll pass a taut, tightly-wound 90 minutes on the sofa in suitably blood-pumping style, and has two leads in Charlize Theron and Joel Egerton willing to get down and dirty – and very wet. 

In a traumatic opening borrowed from that high-altitude Stallone action movie, Theron’s adrenaline junkie Sasha is introduced halfway up a Norwegian cliff face trying to stop her partner (Eric Bana) slipping from her grasp. Cut to six months later and she’s in the Australian outback, cradling his beloved compass and looking to channel her guilt and grief into a gruelling kayak-and-climbing adventure.

In a real good-news/bad-news story for Tourism Australia, what awaits her are spectacular landscapes and spectacularly awful men. For every Kangaroo or Crocodile Dundee, there’s been a dozen more films depicting rural Aussies as a loose collection of sunburnt psychopaths, and The Purge screenwriter Jeremy Robbins does nothing to rehabilitate their rep here. Egerton’s shaven-headed outback thrill-seeker initially steps in to save her from the attention of gurning Outbackers, before revealing that he’s 10 times worse than any of them. And he’s got a crossbow. Ya little ripper. 

It’s a real good-news/bad-news story for Tourism Australia

From here, it’s a life-or-death chase through the wilds (New South Wales’ Blue Mountains, IRL). There’s some fake-looking green screen but plenty of spectacular life-or-death struggles and thrilling rock-climbing sequences that are filmed in-camera. 

By her own incendiary standards, it’s a muted Theron performance. Neither playing hysterical victim nor a raging Furiosa type, she’s on a forlorn quest to bring depth to an underwritten character. The two-hander could use a third character to triangulate the drama and give Sasha someone to bounce off. 

But if the emotional side slides by, the action is nicely handled by Kormákur. By now, the Everest, Beast and Adrift director could make a brisk survival thriller in his sleep and he finds different ways to keep the pair’s clashes fresh and exciting. Egerton, who between this and Carry-On, is carving a niche for himself as Netflix’s action man of choice, is enjoyably deranged as her adversary, a leering imp with bushcraft for a superpower. Generic, sure, but gripping enough, Apex has located a corner of God’s own country where the devil reigns.

On Netflix now.