Crew
Director – Edward Drake, Screenplay – Edward Drake & Corey Large, Producers – Corey Large & Sean Patrick O’Reilly, Photography – Wai Sun Cheng, Music – Hugh Wielenga, Visual Effects – MOD (Supervisor – Art Miroshin) & Vortex DI Corp (Supervisor – Nimrod Zalmanowitz), Special Effects – Brant FX (Supervisor – Brant McIlroy), Makeup Effects – Samantha Dempsey & Nadia Hoecklin, Production Design – Frederica Hodgkinson. Production Company – 308 Enterprises/Bondit Media Capital/Head Gear Films/Metrol Technology/The Exchange.
Cast
Bruce Willis (Thomas Malone), Neal McDonough (Rainsford), Nels Lennarson (Bishop), Megan Peta Hill (Jeza), Lochlyn Munro (Lyle), Corey Large (Carrion), Alexia Fast (West), Trevor Gretsky (Ecka)
Plot
The near future. Aging former police detective Thomas Malone is released from prison and taken to Apex Island. There a group of wealthy paying hunters organise regular hunts. Malone is informed that they intend to hunt him across the island as he runs to freedom. Malone is insistent on asking what happens if he manages to eliminate all the hunters, but nobody knows because that has never happened. As the hunt begins, Malone stays hidden in the woods and allows the tensions among the hunters to cause them to eliminate each other.
Apex was one of a series of films that Bruce Willis appeared in from around 2020 to 2023 that are considered universally terrible. These were mostly low-budget action films, although there are a handful of genre vehicles among these such as Breach (2020), Cosmic Sin (2021), Corrective Measures (2022) and Assassin (2023). In 2022, it was publicly revealed that Willis was suffering from dementia, in particular from aphasia that left him having difficulty with speech and comprehension. During this period, Willis signed up for a series of films where he would make $1-2 million per appearance usually for only a few minutes screen time in a supporting role that would be billed as the lead. In 2023, it was announced that he was retiring because he had deteriorated too badly to continue and was having difficulty even recognising where he was.
A surprising number of these films were produced in Canada. There are a number of recurring names on the credits including Edward Drake, who also directed Cosmic Sin and six of the other latter day Bruce films and scripted nine of them. There’s also his co-writer, co-producer and frequent actor in these films Corey Large, who appeared in thirteen of the other Bruce films, and Sean Patrick O’Reilly, an animator/comic-book artist best known for the Howard Lovecraft animated films, who has produced eight of the films and directed Corrective Measures.
Apex is a variant on Richard Connell’s classic story The Most Dangerous Game (1924). The story concerns Count Zaroff, a Russian aristocrat who enjoys hunting human game on his island and a man forced to survive with only his bare hands where he succeeds in turning the tables despite. The classic film version was The Most Dangerous Game (1932) with Leslie Banks as Zaroff and Joel McCrea and Fay Wray on the run. This was remade several times – I have a full listing of these here in my essay Films About Human Bloodsports and Death Games – and there are a large number of unofficial variants. The human hunting theme took off in a big way around the 2020-2 period with films such as with Prey (2021), The Retreat (2021), Death Hunt (2022), Hounded (2022), Hunt Club (2022), Hunting Ava Bravo (2022) and another remake of The Most Dangerous Game (2022). My theory is that these were easy films to make during Covid lockdown – shot outdoors with minimal casts to avoid enclosed sets and quarantine procedures.
Apex is certainly an oddity among these Most Dangerous Game knockoffs. As I started to watch, I kept wondering how they were going to pull the basic premise off given Bruce Willis’s unstable mental condition. I mean, he is cast as the hero – in a typical Most Dangerous Game scenario, this requires him to be active in a very physical role that involves running around in the outdoors and turning the tables on his armed hunters using his bare hands. The film even underscores this point with introductory scenes where the hunters are told that Bruce is a total badass and he calmly asks what would happened if he eliminated all the huntwers. That seems a difficult task to pull off for a lead actor at the age of 66, let alone suffering from cognitive issues.
The filmmakers get around this in some interesting ways. One of these is that they keep Bruce out of the action. He makes occasional appearances, is seen hiding among the trees and occasionally comes out to confront his pursuers. Even then there are no scenes where he is directly placed into action and seen fighting the hunters with his bare hands. The sole action scene he gets comes right at the end where he wades into action with a big gun but that just involves him standing shooting at everything around him. The film gets around this by adeptly contorting its story so as to have Bruce the man hunted but it in fact be the rivalries among the hunters and one psychopathic member of the group that ends up eliminating them rather than Bruce.
The surprise is that Bruce Willis emerges fairly well out of this. Apex was one of the earlier among these last films he made so you can surmise that he still had more of his wits to him than he did when it came to later films. He does emerge fairly well as the badass described and rises to show something of the classic Bruce. Surprisingly, the headline name of the show is not Bruce but Neal McDonough, who I have always regarded as an okay but unremarkable performer. Here however McDonough gives a fierce and intelligent performance that quite owns the show.
One other oddity of Apex is that it takes place in some kind of future setting. Neal McDonough arrives on the island using a teleportation device, while Bruce is aided by a hologram at various intervals (I wasn’t clear if this was an A.I. or a human operator), while the world seems to exist in a state where there is cooperation between the wealthy and the penal system such that they can use prisons as a recruiting ground for game to hunt. This is something that peculiarly goes uncommented on – there is no real reason why the film could not have been set contemporary, for instance.
Trailer here