I’m Trevor with the Sasquatch Movie Minute with a look at APEX on Netflix, directed by Baltasar Kormakur, starring Charlize Theron and Taron Egerton. A grieving adventure-seeker’s trip to the wild rapids of Australia turns into a desperate hunt when a local psychopath starts stalking her.

1 out of 5

Bleh, what a waste of actors and locations. The Australian wild looked stunning, but this was such a disappointing by-the-numbers thriller, nothing that we haven’t seen a million times before in better movies. For example, the beginning mountain climbing sequence should be vertigo-inducing, like THE FALL or CLIFFHANGER, or hell even VERTICAL LIMIT. But the bland fake CGI background of the mountain valley have us feeling nothing. This is a why-women-choose-the-bear movie, where all men are either lecherous or impotent, but the film does nothing with that idea. I kept craving a creative action beat, or a clever character moment, or a morally difficult choice, but nothing.

Best Scene. The change-over of Egerton’s character from nice to evil was boringly done, but when he starts his chase, Egerton gives us a dance sequence that is silly and weird and scary all at once. It gives us some hope that the rest of the film might be as edgy, but its not. There was a nice one-shot action shot where we followed Theron tumbling down a hill and into a river. It was clearly CGI, but kinetic at least!

Best Performance. I’ll give credit to Taron Egerton, he is going balls-to-the-wall nuts here, making his parody of an Aussie local curdle into vicious insanity. Between this and SMOKE, he is making a run at the Oldman/Busey/Walken/Dafoe craziness hall of fame. I’ve seen Theron play this tough-as-nails character many many times before, and she adds nothing new here. She clearly worked her ass off in the climbing and water sequences, but I wished that effort could have been used in making her character interesting.

Hard pass, unless you crave some wacky Taron Egerton and some lush Aussie scenery!