Apex

Baltasar Kormákur is an interesting export from that beautiful, barren volcanic island. He has directed a few mediocre action films, but is drawn to films where nature plays a key role. The Deep, which is about a man struggling to survive in freezing cold water after a boat capsizes, Everest, which hardly needs any further introduction, even the silly but entertaining Beast, where Idris Elba battles a lion on the savannah. Now it's Charlize Theron's turn to venture out into the Australian wilderness for a solo adventure.

A brief summary of the plot, as it really can't be described in many more words: Theron plays an adrenaline junkie who decides to tame a wild and threatening river but discovers that nature isn't the greatest threat.

It's a simple, rather well-worn plot, you might say. We've seen it many times before, as it's a bit of River Wild mixed with a bit of Deliverance. At the start, we're introduced to the main character and her husband, played by Eric Bana, where a tragic prologue sets the tone, and five months later, Theron's character Sasha is off on her own adventure in Australia. Naturally, she encounters a bunch of hillbillies at a petrol station and it reeks of banjo-playing mischief. Here she meets Taron Egerton's smiling Ben, who comes to the rescue. A nice bloke, said no one in the audience...

Sasha sets off along the river and it soon becomes clear that it's a bald-headed creep who is her worst enemy, not nature itself. We're piling cliché upon cliché here, but does it really matter at all if you've embarked on the adventure not expecting the wheel to be reinvented? It doesn't matter as long as it's well-made and reasonably exciting.

Apex is well-acted, stylish, and maintains a fast pace, but I must admit: the title Apex suggests, perhaps rather bluntly and foolishly, that we'll encounter something else along the rapids, something I was hoping for and one of the reasons I skipped the trailer. What? A prehistoric crocodile, a mutated pike, who knows? That's not the case, even if there are fangs...
I've always liked Theron's charisma and she does a good job here and the same goes for Egerton, even if some of his lines come across as rather silly.

It's not a memorable film, but it's fun entertainment for the moment. It fits in quite well with the modern concept of new streaming films, like a bag of mixed sweets where some are tasty and others you eat simply because you've opened the bag and refuse to throw away something you've paid for. In summary, Apex is based on a formula that, for better or worse, sums up Kormákur's Hollywood journey so far: competent but nothing to write home about.