Apex Feels More Like a Real Movie Than Your Average Netflix Joint

During the pivotal scene in which Apex reveals itself to be not a meditative outdoor adventure in which Sasha, played by Charlize Theron, grieves her late boyfriend but a thriller in which she is hunted to the death, Taron Egerton’s Ben muses about what’s behind their shared love of extreme activities. Some people, he notes, like to talk about the pursuit of perfection, or how the danger ends up making them feel more alive, but “personally, I think the wiring is just messed up.” We’re about to learn just how awry Ben’s wiring is, when he informs his intended victim that she has until the end of a song to get as far away as she can before he starts coming after her with a bow and arrow. But the most rewarding aspect of Apex, which was directed by Baltasar Kormákur and written by Jeremy Robbins, is the degree to which Ben’s thesis holds true for Sasha as well. Apex, which primarily consists of its two main characters chasing each other around the fictional Wandarra National Park on location in the real Australian Blue Mountains, is more focused in action than in psychological nuance. But when it does slow down, it’s to acknowledge the spiky restlessness in its heroine that drives her to test not just her own limits but also those of the people around her.

That includes her partner, Tommy (Eric Bana), who in the opening sequence dies while climbing the Troll Wall mountains with Sasha in Norway, during the kind of grueling trip that, as he gently tries to broach, he’s no longer really interested in taking. She teases him about his age as they curl up together in a portaledge hanging terrifyingly off the side of a cliff face, but it’s obvious that what he’s saying is not something she wants to hear. Tommy’s death is what, months later, inspires Sasha to travel to Australia, where he grew up and where she intends to do some whitewater kayaking while grappling with his absence. While at a gas station on her way to the park, she crosses paths with some leering larrikins and also with Ben, who’s chipper and chatty, who makes his own jerky, and who offers Sasha guidance on where to camp despite the fact that she doesn’t exactly respond with warmth. After a solo trip down some roaring rapids, Sasha finds that her campsite has been raided and that Ben, who’s set up his own site nearby, has chosen her as the latest target for what turns out to be a regular practice of tracking down the most dangerous game. Sasha’s plenty capable but then so is Ben, and their cat-and-mouse games through the forest and into the canyons provide a decent amount of suspense. 

Kormákur is an Icelandic filmmaker whose breakout was the 2006 crime drama Jar City and who has a tendency to bounce around both genres and continents. He directed Mark Wahlberg in the 2012 New Orleans–set smuggling drama Contraband, then reunited with the star the next year for 2 Guns, his buddy-cop comedy with Denzel Washington, and has in the time since shown a particular verve for movies about natural peril, from the mountaineering disaster movie Everest to Beast in which Idris Elba battles a rogue lion in South Africa. Kormákur appreciates the wilderness for its beauty and all the ways it can kill people, and his facility with shooting in the setting as well as the spectacular locations themselves make Apex feel like more of a real movie than the average Netflix fare. It’s a simple, pulpy affair, but it’s also aware that it’s part of a subgenre of Australia-set cinema in which the only things more likely to try to murder you than nature if you leave the city are the locals. Egerton, giving a James McAvoy–esque murder imp performance, offers an amusing nod toward that tradition when he’s forced to admit, despite all his efforts to blend into the landscape he knows by heart, he’s technically a blow-in himself, having moved to the area as a kid with his mother.

Theron, meanwhile, hurls herself into the sinewy action sequences that have increasingly been her home turf over the past two decades, flinging herself down hills and into rivers and navigating some precarious rock-climbing terrain. But it’s actually the stretches in between that are her most interesting in the movie, as she leans into the flinty quality she’s able to exude onscreen when she chooses, that aloofness that lands somewhere between independence and iciness. A scene in which Sasha finds herself trapped when the same guys who eyed her at the gas station pull up behind at a campsite emphasizes the degree to which a woman on her own has plenty reason to be on her guard, to walk a fine line of warding off attention without doing anything that could be used as an excuse for offense. But there’s also clearly a part of Sasha that wonders if her extreme capability and all that desire to prove herself against the world has hardened her in other ways, made her incapable of tolerating the vulnerability in others, including the man she loved. Apex never quite knits together Ben’s mommy issues with Sasha’s more complicated ones, but it’s a satisfying showcase for Theron’s continued capacity as one of our most reliable action stars.