Sometimes I turn on Netflix and it pushes some new Netflix movie in my face, starts playing the preview automatically, and I think “Oh, I’ll just start it and see what it’s like.” Soon I’m watching the whole stinking thing and feeling dirty afterward.
That’s Apex.
When a movie is named Apex, it had better not become ironic. Alas, the derivitave 2026 Charlize Theron thriller is set “down under” in Australia, and keeps gravitating to the mediocre middle. Apex my ape-arse.
I’ll grant Netflix one thing: They know how to hook you. Apex opens with Charlize “Furiosa” Theron and Eric “the other Hulk” Bana half-way up a cliffside, huddling in a tent clipped into the rocks of Trollveggen (Troll Wall), a Norwegian mountain that is brutally vertical. The couple, whose marriage is forged on limit-pushing adventure, has almost finished their tandem ascent, which requires several days of belaying and peeing oneself. Except Theron, making the final pitch, keeps losing her grip and falling, caught by the safety line and Bana on backup.
Theron’s frustration shifts into defiance, unwilling to stop trying, so Bana has to be the prevailing cooler head. A storm approaches, it gets dank and dark, and they set up their pendulous shelter — an even scarier place to sleep than a refrigerator box in downtown Baltimore. (Their situation is reminiscent of Sascha DiGiulian’s recent 23-day-ascent of El Capitan in Yosemite, which among other things, is a really weird way to get free Red Bull.)
Inside the tent, Bana questions their risk-taking ways: Can we take it down a few hundred notches? Settle down a tad? Have date nights that aren’t potentially fatal? Theron isn’t having it. She’s a confirmed adrenaline junkie — or whatever you call people who think being a fingernail and crampon spike away from turning their bodies into abstract art is “fun.” It’s odd that they’d have this discussion half-way up Falltoyourdeath Mountain, as opposed to, say, a sea-level coffeehouse or on a cushy sofa in couple’s therapy.
Anyone who’s seen the opening scene of Cliffhanger (1993), or any movie where a cop’s partner is one day from retirement, knows where this is heading. There’s a reason Charlize Theron is the featured star and Eric Bana isn’t. But it’s still strange how stiffly perfunctory their heart-to-heart is, and how abruptly the film cuts from the tent interior to the couple rappelling downward while dodging ice and rocks. The scene feels as slapdash as dislodged gravel.
Cut to Theron, five months later, driving through the Australian wildnerness. I don’t know Aussie geography but the footage of New South Wales rivers and tree-covered canyons is an appropriately gorgeous and remote setting for an outdoor thriller. To her credit, Theron is believably fit and makes being 50 look like being 25, so well done, Theron — now go kick some ass.
Apex doesn’t delay putting our guilt-soaked widow to the test, because she’s made the altogether perplexing decision to traverse the backwoods alone (jumbo can of pepper-spray notwithstanding) and stop at gas station convenience stores populated by the Australian equivalent of the hillbillys from Deliverance. Theron basically has a neon sign over her head that says “Hunt me down, boys!” and “I’ve never seen the movie Wolf Creek!”
After she rebuffs some scruffy deer hunters, a clean-cut local makes friendly smalltalk and gives Theron navigational help accessing the Woronora River (or a fictionalized equivalent). Here’s the easy way, here’s the hard way, here’s the best way, and here’s the way where those Field & Stream rejects will make you worry about that Deliverance scene where Ned Beatty ends up crawling around in his underwear. Apex quickly puts Theron in a Most Dangerous Game situation, in an area too remote to seek outside help or even a cellphone signal. Apex could have built more suspense with its Cheryl Strayed-like, Wild moments of vulnerable female solitude and contemplation, but forget it: We’re on to a poisonous snake, a stolen backpack, and the guy suspected of being a creep turning out to be a creep.
Apex‘s strong suit is in its scenery and how well Charlize Theron fits into it as a convincing hiker, climber, and kayaker. Presumably there’s a lot of body-double switcheroo happening, but Theron looks capable of much of the action, even when kayaking through river rapids and Level 5 plunges. Unfortunately the movie rushes its cat-and-mouse progression, with a few good scenes of Theron on the run (she dodges crossbow bolts like a Mayan outrunning spears in Apocalypto) and chimney-climbing narrow chasm walls to hide from a very accomplished stalker.
What I wanted from Apex was for Theron to use her ingenuity to outsmart her opponent, much as Arnold Schwarzenegger did when being tracked by a lobster-mouthed alien in Predator. At this, Apex doesn’t deliver: Much of its action is schematic at best, and the person chasing Theron catches up with her so easily that I wondered if he’d slipped a tracking device into her backpack. He didn’t — the script just needs him to catch up so the movie can keep going. So even when Theron expertly kayaks down twelve waterfalls, sprints under eleventy bushes, and slides down a dirty ledge until falling 40 feet into a river pool, her pursuer pops up like a Jack-in-the-Box a stone’s throw behind her.
Worse, Apex turns into a typically gruesome serial-killer story, which would be fine — but would it have (serial) killed the creators to think of some surprises or twists? How about if, instead of disappearing, the Deliverance hunters tried to save Theron from the homicidal maniac? Or if Theron turned out to be a sinister apex predator herself? Instead, Theron’s everywoman has all the character traction of a waxed flip-flop, while (spoiler alert) Taron Egerton‘s sadistic persona is as one-dimensional as a squished meatball. No sooner does he mention primitive tribes who file down their teeth than he’s spitting out dentures and baring his own pearly nubs like a cookiecutter shark. Gosh, I wonder where his homemade jerky comes from? Can you guess? Hint: Not Costco!
On the plus side, Egerton is physically fit to the point of what people call “shredded,” and he and Theron would make formidable opponents if Jeremy Robbins‘s script were as toned and muscular as they are. As it is, Theron doesn’t so much outsmart Egerton as wait for him to make stupid mistakes, and the middle section of their battle amounts to a outdoor cagematch filmed as if Netflix (or director Baltasar Kormákur) were promoting a drone-camera company.
Hang in for the ending, which the heroine and villain literally “hang in for.” The opening and closing scenes have nice symmetry: both scaling cliffsides, both with Theron belaying a male counterpart. Apex‘s final climbing scene offers the straightforward suspense of a free-solo climber at the mercy of her calloused fingertips. Forget Tom Cruise’s Utah clamber at the start of Mission: Impossible 2; this is closer to Alex Honnold‘s real-life climb in the 2018 documentary Free Solo, but you only have to hold your breath for a couple of harrowing minutes.
Apex is dumb, and oops, Netflix tricked me again into watching another half-assed regurgitated story, but I give the film credit for a worthy finale. I still gotta ask: Who in their right mind ascends cliffsides? Transcendence my foot.
