At the world premiere of her latest, Apex, Charlize Theron stated that it’s “my favorite movie I’ve ever made.” While audiences may not share that level of enthusiasm, the Oscar-winning actress’ latest—arriving on the heels of a string of misfires—is a return to solid ground for its headliner, a no-frills survival thriller that’s as rugged as its wilderness setting.
Designed to be seen on a big screen but premiering (with a surprising lack of fanfare) on Netflix, Apex (April 24) opens vertiginously, with Sasha (Theron) sticking her head out of the cramped tent she shares with her husband Tommy (Eric Bana) to gaze up, and down, the terrifying Norwegian mountain face to which their suspended shelter is tethered.
Director Baltasar Kormákur seamlessly blends the real and the CGI in this and subsequent death-defying shots, creating a harrowing sense of his characters’ precarious position. Things only get worse when, the next day, they attempt to reach the summit and are thwarted by a storm, during which an avalanche knocks out Tommy and, to avoid being dragged off the mountain, an anguished Sasha lets him plummet to his death.
Five months later, Sasha is driving into the Australian Outback, alone and wracked with grief and guilt. The purpose of this outing is enigmatic, but less mysterious is the fact that she’s taking a big risk venturing Down Under on her own. After signing in at the local ranger station, whose bulletin board is crowded with missing persons flyers, a visit to a gas station convenience store underscores the danger in which she’s putting herself, courtesy of a run-in with menacing hunters.
Fortunately, they’re shooed away by Ben (Taron Egerton), a local who sells homemade beef jerky at the outpost and who kindly gives Sasha two potential paths to follow—with her choosing the “hard” one.
Theron’s reputation as a cinematic bada-- is well-established thanks to Æon Flux, Atomic Blonde, and Mad Max: Fury Road (among others). And she’s in fine steely form in Apex, speaking little but expressing stern determination and deep distress as she slowly makes her way into the vast badlands.
Waking at her camp one morning, she discovers that her backpack is missing. Heading down the river that runs through this lush stretch of the Outback—its verdant denseness a far cry from the better-known desert—she discovers a kayak and, with it, the camp of Ben, who agrees to provide her with replacement supplies and compels her to stay for breakfast.
Ben may be a fellow loner, but his friendliness carries a whiff of deviousness, and that turns into outright menace when he reveals that he’s the one who pilfered Sasha’s goods. Worse, he makes clear that he plans to hunt her, giving her a headstart that lasts as long as a hip-hop song that he dances to with deranged fervor.
Sporting a bald head and buff physique, Egerton is a ball of crazy in Apex. With his trusty high-powered crossbow at the ready, he soon pursues Sasha with intent to kill, transforming the proceedings into a taut faceoff in one of the most remote and least hospitable places on the planet.
Economically written by Jeremy Robbins, Apex isn’t a particularly original creature, taking its cues from the likes of The Most Dangerous Game, Deliverance, The River Wild, The Edge, and The Revenant. Nonetheless, it benefits from Kormákur’s clean and striking direction, full of ominously majestic panoramas of these hostile environs, where the morning mist is thick, and the jungle is thicker.
It’s the roaring rapids, however, that prove most daunting, and the film takes great advantage of them in sequences that convincingly posit Theron in the middle of aquatic danger, forced to navigate rocky waterways that are peppered with enormous rocks and end, invariably, in towering waterfalls.
Apex is a cat-and-mouse game between a fearsome adventurer driven to conquer nature and a lunatic who’s the embodiment of his lethal habitat, yet their streamlined and ferocious battle wastes little time italicizing such concerns. Instead, it focuses on Sasha’s moment-to-moment efforts to evade her stalker and, when that turns out to be impossible, to best him before he can finish her off.
In those latter instances, Kormákur emphasizes the pain and exhaustion of his characters, and that weightiness lends the material its oomph. Far from a CGI action-fest, the film has an authenticity which extends beyond its on-location cinematography to its combat and, with it, the arduousness of its heroine’s struggle.
Startling his prey by squawking like one of the region’s noisy birds, Ben is a fearsome madman who’s embraced his primitive instincts and impulses, and if Apex can’t quite mask some of its surprises regarding its villain, it manages to execute two effective jolt scares that up the proceedings’ anxiousness.
Though Theron’s protagonist is more civilized than her adversary, she’s exceedingly capable of holding her own in trying situations, and the actress’ coiled performance is effective precisely because one can see Sasha assessing, adjusting, and planning on the fly as she runs and paddles—and, inevitably, climbs—for her life.
Reminiscent of Sylvester Stallone and Renny Harlin’s 1993 blockbuster Cliffhanger, Sasha must ultimately face her greatest fear in order to make it out of the Outback alive, and if that third-act development is too writerly for its own good, the gung-ho Theron and Egerton help make it go down smoothly. Apex cares less about originality and depth than it does about tapping a jagged, elemental vein.
To that end, its finale, regardless of its schematic set-up, gets the job done in striking fashion. Boasting more than a few gasp-inducing shots of its lead doing her best Free Solo routine, it celebrates the harsh kill or be killed nature of the wild and man’s capacity for, if not taming it, then at least reaching a stalemate with it.
In that regard, Apex is not dissimilar from Kormákur’s Beast, another tale of an every-person pitted against the natural world. Like its predecessor, it delivers on its B-movie promise efficiently, in the process reconfirming the eternal pleasure of seeing isolated individuals—and movie stars—demonstrate that with a little resolve (and violence), even the toughest of hardships can be overcome.
