Crew
Director – Baltasar Kormákur, Screenplay – Jeremy Robbins, Producers – Ian Bryce, Peter Chernin, A.J. Dix, Beth Kono, Baltasar Kormákur, David Ready, Charlize Theron & Jenno Topping, Photography – Lawrence Sher, Music – Högni Egilsson, Visual Effects Supervisor – Enrik Pavdeja, Visual Effects – Framestore (Supervisor – Gavin McKenzie), Rising Sun Pictures & Union VFX, Visual Effects & Animation – Industrial Light & Magic (Supervisor – Mohen Leo), Special Effects Supervisor – Rodney Burke, Makeup Effects – Make-Up Effects Group, Production Design – Jean-Vincent Puzos. Production Company – Chernin Entertainment/Ian Bryce/Secret Menu/RVK Studios.
Cast
Charlize Theron (Sasha), Tagon Egerton (Ben), Eric Bana (Tommy), Matt Whalen (Hunter)
Plot
Sasha heads to Wandarra National Park in the Australian Outback on a wilderness adventure. While stopped at a convenience store, Ben steps in as two crass hunters harass her. Ben proves friendly and offers suggestions for a better route to take for kayaking. Sasha sets out but wakes up after camping the night in the wild to discover that her backpack is missing. She finds Ben camped nearby and he offers help. She then discovers that Ben has been watching her and was the one who took her pack. Ben then produces a crossbow and announces that he is giving her a headstart before he comes hunting her.
Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur premiered with 101 Reykjavik (2000) and then went onto various other films such as The Sea (2002), A Little Trip to Heaven (2005), Jar City (2006) and White Night Wedding (2008). He was brought to the US for various thrillers and action films such as Inhale (2010), Contraband (2012) and 2 Guns (2013). Kormákur’s greatest acclaim has come for his survival dramas such as The Deep (2012), Everest (2015), his single best film, and Adrift (2018), while he also produced Against the Ice (2022). He first genre film was Beast (2022) with Idris Elba against a killer lion in Africa. In genre material, Kormákur also produced Summerland (2010) about elves and the tv series Katla (2021) about the appearance of doppelgangers in a small Icelandic village in the lee of an active volcano.
Kormákur has a great love of the outdoors in his films. You could call him an extreme adventures sports filmmaker. Apex, for instance, opens on a vertiginous shot where Charlize Theron unzips her tent and looks straight down the vertical face of a mountain as Kormákur pulls back to reveal she is camped on its sheer side. The subsequent scene with her and Eric Bana scaling the mountainside look as though it really has been shot there. Kormákur gives us assorted other scenes – camera point-of-view shots while white water kayaking, and an especially dramatic and harrowing climax with Charlize Theron rock climbing with her bare hands and feet.
Charlize Theron is okay in the lead and gives the impression of physically throwing herself into the part. Far more impressive is Taron Egerton, who has been proving himself a solid and accomplished actor in the last few years. Though Welsh-born, Egerton slips in to affecting an Australian accent as though he was native born. The role that Egerton gets is essentially a variant on Mick from Wolf Creek (2005) and sequels – the man conversant in native bushcraft who is also a psychopathic killer who likes hunting human victims.
This of course brings us to the big reveal about Apex and that is that it is in fact a Most Dangerous Game film. This is named after Richard Connell’s short story The Most Dangerous Game (1924), which has become a classic. The story concerns a Russian aristocrat on a private island who enjoys hunting human game and a man who is forced to survive with only his bare hands. 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 – as A Game of Death (1945) and Run for the Sun (1956) and more recently The Most Dangerous Game (2017) and The Most Dangerous Game (2022). And there have been a substantial number of other variations on the premise.
The period 2020-2 saw a surprising number of Most Dangerous Game-styled films about people, mostly women, being hunted through the woods by men beginning with Alone (2020) and followed by the likes of Hunted (2020), Prey (2021), The Retreat (2021), Death Hunt (2022), Hunt Club (2022), Hunting Ava Bravo (2022), Unseen (2023), Don’t Move (2024) and You Can’t Run Forever (2024). The great disappointment of Apex is that it is just another one of these – albeit made on a bigger budget and with an A-list actress in the lead. Apart from Taron Egerton, I didn’t find it a particularly standout entry in the field.
Apex should not be confused with two other films with the same title – Apex (1994), a B-budget film involving a time-travelling war with the machines, and Apex (2021), another Most Dangerous Game film starring Bruce Willis.
Trailer here