Apex Review — Charlize Theron Is Better Than This Movie, and the Movie Is Still Worth Watching

 

Let me be honest about what Apex is before I tell you why I watched all 95 minutes of it without looking at my phone.

Apex is a survival thriller in which a woman is hunted through the Australian wilderness by a psychopathic stranger. The script, written by Jeremy Robbins, is not doing anything you haven't seen before. The villain's motivations are thin. The backstory is dispensed with quickly, almost impatiently, as though the film itself knows that nobody came here for character development. The plot moves in the direction you expect it to move, and it gets there without much surprise.

And yet. Charlize Theron is in it. And that changes things.

What the Film Is Actually About

Sasha (Theron) is a grieving extreme sports enthusiast who travels to Australia's remote Wandarra National Park to scatter her husband's ashes after his death in a climbing accident. She meets Ben (Taron Egerton) at a gas station — friendly, slightly off, the kind of person you notice and then try to stop noticing. Within the first act, it becomes clear that Ben is hunting her through the wilderness with a crossbow, and that this is not a new habit for him.

That's the setup. Director Baltasar Kormákur, who made the genuinely excellent Everest and the underrated 2 Guns, films the Australian landscape with real attention — Lawrence Sher's cinematography makes the terrain feel both beautiful and hostile in equal measure. The practical effects and location work give the film a physical reality that most streaming thrillers lack. This looks and feels like something that actually happened somewhere, rather than a soundstage approximation of outdoors.

The film runs 95 minutes and does not waste many of them.

The Honest Part

Here is what doesn't work. The script is working from a template so familiar that the film occasionally feels like it's checking boxes rather than building tension. The villain's psychology is suggested rather than developed. There is a point — around the second act turn — where the film makes a choice that strains credibility enough to briefly break the spell. The end credits song, an Icelandic electropop track called "Nasty Boy" by Trabant, is so tonally at odds with what precedes it that it becomes unintentionally funny.

These are real problems. The film's critics are not wrong about them.

What Theron Brings That the Script Doesn't Provide

Here is what works, and why it works harder than the material deserves.

Charlize Theron has been the best thing in several mediocre action films, and she does it here too — but Apex gives her more to work with physically than most. The climbing sequences, the canoeing, the sheer sustained athleticism of the survival sequences are not stunt work and obvious doubling. Theron commits to the physical reality of the role in a way that closes the gap between what the script asks and what the audience is willing to believe.

More importantly, she brings an interior life to Sasha that the dialogue doesn't particularly support. The grief that opens the film — watching Theron sit alone with her husband's absence — is not something that had to be there, given the genre. The fact that it is, and that it persists into the chase sequences as something Sasha is carrying rather than leaving behind, is what separates this from a Theron-shaped video game.

Taron Egerton's Ben is exactly the villain this film needs — charming enough that the early deception is believable, psychologically broken enough that you understand you're watching something clinical rather than passionate. He balances rough warmth and matter-of-fact sadism in a way that keeps Ben from tipping into cartoon. It doesn't require a great performance to serve this role, but Egerton gives one anyway.

Who This Is For

Apex is not a great film. It is a very good one in the narrow genre it is working in, and it knows what it is. If you are watching Netflix looking for something that moves quickly, looks good, and delivers the satisfactions of a well-made chase film without requiring you to think too hard, Apex is, without reservation, the right choice.

If you are looking for something that will stay with you — something that has something to say about grief, or wilderness, or the psychology of violence — you will not find that here, despite Theron's best efforts to provide it.

The film has accumulated over 300 million views globally since its April 24 release. That number makes sense. It is exactly the kind of thing a lot of people want to watch on a weeknight, and it delivers that thing reliably. Sometimes that is enough.