Hello and happy Michael weekend! I’m just kidding. I don’t feel like there’s much happy about that. I will not be covering that movie today, because this post is about stuff I actually want to recommend. But maybe I’ll cover it next week—I still haven’t decided if I want to weigh in or not (beyond what I’ll be doing on my podcast, Critical Darlings, next week—available wherever you get your podcasts!). So for now, let’s instead talk about two fun action movies, and two charming TV series, shall we?

Apex (Netflix) 

Charlize Theron has pretty much only done action movies (plus The School for Good and Evil) since she was Oscar nominated for playing Megyn Kelly in a movie in 2019. I can understand the horror of being involved in that hideously dated film being reason enough to avoid wading back into drama. But I do wish that Theron wasn’t Liam Neeson-ing quite so hard. I miss her in things like Young Adult and Tully and, hell, In the Valley of Elah. She’s a great action star, and I’m sure she has her valid reasons for mostly selecting this kind of work, but a little variation would be nice.

That said, she’s a more than capable lead of Apex, an action-survival movie from Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur, here returning to some of the mountain-climbing suspense he covered more extensively in 2015’s Everest. Theron plays an avid outdoorswoman and risk-taker who, while mourning a tragedy (something we’ve never seen in a movie before), heads to the Australian bush to do some whitewater kayaking and maybe, just maybe, heal a little bit. 

She instead runs into a sinister woodsman played by Taron Egerton, shaved of head and rippled of frame. He at first appears friendly enough, if a little oversolicitous; certainly less creepy than the other rural freaks who menace Theron at a rest stop. But before too long Egerton and Theron are alone in the wild together and he reveals that, well, he’s going to hunt her with a crossbow. It’s chilling stuff, as this stuff always is: a character calmly telling another that they intend to kill them in short order will, to me, never not be impossibly dreadful. 

The chase begins and Theron goes thrashing through brush, splashing into rivers, and eventually clambering up a sheer rock face. Egerton’s motivations are revealed to be even darker than what is initially suggested, which gives Apex the particular shiver of Australian horror, the sense that people have been badly warped by this incredibly dangerous natural environment which settlers never should have invaded in the first place. 

I maybe would like a few more set pieces, but otherwise Kormákur holds our attention. The film looks pretty slick for a direct-to-Netflix release; its lighting and special effects are of a higher grade than the usual “we shot this under the twin suns of Tatooine at high noon on a retrofitted Handicam” fare. I suppose the streamer wanted to maintain a better standard for Theron, who helped bring them success with The Old Guard. (Less so with The Old Guard 2: Older Guard.) This is not high art, but it is an engaging and pleasingly grim diversion for a Saturday night. And there’s no Megyn Kelly to be found anywhere.