Danger on the Rocks (shaken, not stirred)
Reviews and Comments by Ken Burke
I invite you to join me on a regular basis to see how my responses to current cinematic offerings compare to the critical establishment, which I’ll refer to as either the CCAL (Collective Critics at Large) if they’re supportive or the OCCU (Often Cranky Critics Universe) when they go negative. However, due to COVID concerns I’m mostly addressing streaming options with limited visits to theaters, where I don’t think I’ve missed much anyway, though better options may be coming soon. (Note: Anything in bold blue [or near purple] is a link to something in the above title or the review.)
My reviews’ premise: “You can’t please everyone, so you got to please yourself.”
(from "Garden Party" by Rick Nelson and the Stone Canyon Band, 1972 album of the song’s name)
However, if you’d like to know more about rationale of my ratings visit this explanatory site.
Apex (Baltasar Kormákur) rated R 96 min.
Here’s the trailer:
(Use the full screen button in the image’s lower right to enlarge its size;
activate the same button or use “esc” keyboard key to return to normal.)
If you can abide plot spoilers read on, but this blog’s intended for those who’ve seen the film or want to save some $ (as well as recognizing those readers like me who just aren’t that tech-savvy). To help any of you who want to learn more details yet avoid these all-important plot-reveals I’ll identify any give-away sentences/sentence-clusters with colors plus arrows:
⇒The first and last words will be noted with arrows and red.⇐ OK, now continue on if you prefer.
WHAT HAPPENS: We begin with intrepid mountain-climbing couple Sasha (Charlize Theron) and Tommy (Eric Bana) attempting to scale Norway’s treacherous Troll Wall when he tells her he’s tired of such demanding adventures (she’s not), then makes an unexpected exit when he slips, she can’t carry his weight, so she has to let him go in a fall to his death. Then, 5 months later in tribute to him she goes to Australia’s Wandarra National Park to run the rapids in her kayak even though a ranger (Aaron Pedersen) says it’s a dangerous place for a lone traveler as there have been a lot of disappeared folks over recent years, but she moves on anyway. At a gas station she’s harassed by 2 local hunters (Matt Whelan, Rob Carlton) until another guy, Ben (Taron Egerton), sends them away, then gives her a tip on where to start her journey. The next day she maneuvers the rapids well, camps overnight, finds her backpack missing the next morning. She continues down the river, comes upon Ben’s camp where he offers her some food and supplies, but also tells her he knows who she is, he’s the one who stole her bag (he gives it back), then pulls out a crossbow and starts a song on a boombox, telling her she’s got until the end of the song to try to get away from him. She’s back on her kayak for awhile but falls out of it, runs along the riverbank with Ben in pursuit, occasionally shooting arrows at her, until she stumbles into a bear trap. He opens the trap, takes her captive, then they go to a cave where bodies of those missing people hang (all dead now) because he’s fascinated by some lore of ingesting a person’s spirit by eating their liver (yes, that's an allusion to Hannibal Lector, as if we need anything more scary to be disturbed by in this eerie plot).
As she pretends to be close to him she bites off his ear, frees herself from her leg shackles, runs away, him in pursuit until a steep drop knocks him unconscious so she works on trying to remove her hand shackles until he revives, they struggle, she manages to damage his leg with a rock. ⇒She convinces him they must go up the rock walls to escape this canyon, her climbing, him pulled up in a harness so he unlocks the handcuffs. As she nears the top, hauling him part way up she loosens his rope so he falls to his death, allowing her to move past her ongoing guilt about letting Tommy fall. She makes it to the top, hails down a passing car, tells everything to the ranger. Later, she goes to the ocean to throw away Tommy’s beloved compass as she’s about to face the next phase of her life.⇐ (I’ve given you all the essentials, but if you want a bit more plot detail you can visit this site.)
SO WHAT? For these last 3 postings I’ve found my suggestion for something to see, then write about in The Week magazine (a publication I highly recommend for its summary coverage of national, international, entertainment, food, housing, tech topics), with my following those blurbs leading to some unusual cinematic experiences but with minimal OCCU response (Outcome [Jonah Hill] Rotten Tomatoes 31%, Metacritic 37%, me considerably more generous with 3 of 5 stars; Balls Up [Peter Farrelly] RT 26%, MC 34%, me even more generous with 3½ stars) so these choices weren’t disasters from my perspective, although I could easily see many might have faint interest in them. This week’s choice, though, managed to get into CCAL territory (details in the next section below) with me and my wife, Nina, finding it even better than the scores from the critical establishment. Nina calls it “gripping,” which relates well to the flow of the film’s plot while also being an unintentional pun on Sasha’s determined climbing up difficult rock walls at the beginning and end of this story (I have to wonder how much of what we see on screen is actually being done by Theron, what was the work of stunt doubles [no credits to such that I’ve seen] and/or what has been enhanced with computer graphics where there is acknowledgement given); no matter how these images came to be, though, they’re heart-stopping as Sasha carefully finds tiny crevices as crucial bare hand and foot holds to allow her desperate journeys up along these seemingly-sheer surfaces.
There’s little complexity to keep up with or become narratively-challenged here as the story clearly unfolds in a properly-structured, taut running time, with much of the imagery devoted to Sasha’s fearless handling of the swirling rapids or slowly, carefully making her way up those unforgiving rock walls so there’s lot of reason to be impressed with her wilderness skills, even in her various escape attempts. At the other end of a spectrum of human personality attraction, Ben’s demented focus on self-sufficiency at all costs makes him an effective cold-blooded villain, easy to hate/be fearful of. You may feel uncomfortable in those scenes of Sasha bound in various ways with her intended demise always on the verge of execution, yet she constantly proves herself capable of preventing Ben’s plan of simply adding her to his long list of overpowered victims. If you’d like to explore a bit deeper about this film, go here (7:04 video, Spoilers of course) or you'll find even more at this site.
BOTTOM LINE FINAL COMMENTS: As noted above, the CCAL’s considerably more supportive of Apex than they were of Outcome and Balls Up, with the Rotten Tomatoes positive reviews at 65%, the Metacritic average score at a more-usual for them lower result of 57%; as also noted above, I found all of these to be more worthwhile than did the critical establishment, especially Apex, which you’ll be able to find only on Netflix where it’s free to subscribers or you can sample their catalogue for a month for $8.99 (with ads) or $19.99 (no ads, my choice). If you’d like to see some agreement with my (humbly-noted always insightful) opinion, here’s John Anderson of The Wall Street Journal (whose 80% MC score matches my 4 of 5 stars): “It will prove a literally breathtaking adventure, depending on one’s phobias about heights, water and psychopaths. But it is an ordeal saga, a predator thriller with horror-film accents—and a considerable amount of violence and pain for the character played by the ageless Ms. Theron, who may be giving the most athletically demanding performance of her action-movie career.” More like the CCAL averages is Guy Lodge (MC 70%) in Variety: “For this is, at heart, a proudly pleasurable B-movie lavished with the benefits of A-movie craftsmanship […] it’s a happy throwback to a time when more junk-food cinema got to look and sound and feel this good, albeit on a far bigger canvas.” (It is very visually-dynamic.)
But, you can always count on contrarians like Stephanie Zacharek (MC 50%) of Time: “Apex is efficiently made, and Theron is such an assured performer that she doesn’t allow the audience to linger unduly on Sasha’s suffering. But Apex fails to work either as a vehicle for sick thrills or an excuse for lots of feminist butt-kicking. Ben’s twisted misogynist savagery is exhausting from the start. It’s a wonder he doesn’t die in the movie’s first half, struck down by the deafening clatter of our collective eye rolling.” Choose to watch or just sing along with my Musical Metaphor about Sasha’s ordeals with Ben, The Doors’ "Riders on the Storm" (1971 album L.A. Woman)—which I’ve used 9 times before, as lyrics like “There’s a killer on the road / His brain is squirmin’ like a toad […] If you give this man a ride / Sweet memory will die” give you a sense of the wealth of miserable situations I’ve encountered up on the screen. Maybe next week’s offering will be of a more pleasurable nature.
SHORT TAKES
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