Apex Is Predictable and I Gave It an 8 Anyway

Rating: 8/10 ⭐️

Apex has a 6.1 on IMDb and a 49% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. I watched it on a quiet Monday night, finished it in one sitting, and gave it an 8.

I'm not here to tell you those numbers are wrong. I'm here to tell you they're measuring the wrong thing.

You Already Know How This Ends. That's Fine.

The biggest criticism of Apex is that it's predictable. Charlize Theron plays a grieving rock climber hunted through the Australian wilderness by a local psychopath, and of course she survives. What else was going to happen?

Survival thrillers have never been about surprising you with who lives and who dies. Nobody walked out of Cliffhanger wondering if Stallone was going to make it. Nobody watches The River Wild expecting Meryl Streep to drown in the third act.

The tension lives in how the protagonist gets out, not whether they do. Apex understands this. Baltasar Kormákur, who directed Everest (a movie where you know the ending before you press play), paces this one like a 95-minute pressure cooker that never lets you settle.

There's no wasted subplot about Sasha's backstory dragging on for 20 minutes. The opening gives you what you need: she lost her husband Tommy on a climb, she blames herself, she went to the bush to be alone. Now run.

Charlize Theron Chose to Do This for Real

Charlize Theron performed the vast majority of her climbing stunts herself. Not "she did some of her own stunts" in the way every press junket claims. She trained with Beth Rodden, one of the best rock climbers in the world, and learned to climb from scratch for this role.

The final sequence where Sasha climbs a cliff tandem with Ben, unclips mid-wall, and free-solos the rest to safety? That's Theron doing the climb. New Zealand Olympic kayaker Luuka Jones-Yaxley doubled for Theron in the whitewater sequences, and Theron has said the kayaking was far harder than the climbing.

Almost none of the movie was filmed on a soundstage. The production shot across Blue Mountains National Park, Glenbrook Gorge, Ginninderra Falls, and Royal National Park, all in New South Wales. Kormákur said some locations were so remote the crew had to swim to reach them.

Some studio work happened at Disney Studios Australia. The rest was outside. In a year where Netflix keeps releasing movies that look like they were shot in a parking lot with a green tarp behind the actors, Apex went outside and stayed there.

You can feel the difference every time Theron clings to wet rock or gets dragged through rapids. The camera sits close enough to catch the strain in her arms, the awkward scramble for grip on a ledge. It reads as real because it mostly is.

Taron Egerton Is Having the Time of His Life

Let's talk about Ben.

Taron Egerton plays the kind of villain who gives you a head start because he's that confident he'll catch you. He's not brooding. No monologues about the darkness of the human condition.

At his campsite, Ben dances to music while his prey runs through the bush. Makes bird calls to let Sasha know he's nearby, not because he needs to, but because it's fun for him. That energy never wavers.

When you learn that Ben is a cannibal who has killed at least 20 people, including his own mother, the reveal lands differently because Egerton never played him as a stock movie villain. He played him as a guy who is very, very good at something and enjoys the process.

Egerton built his career on likeable heroes. Eggsy in Kingsman. Elton John in Rocketman. Here, he grins through a scene where he's preparing human jerky and you almost forget what you're looking at. That's not a pivot you see coming from the guy who played Eggsy.

⭐8

Apex is not trying to reinvent the survival thriller. It runs 95 minutes on real rock in real parks. Egerton's villain dances to music while his prey runs through the bush, and that unhinged energy carries the whole thing.

The critics who called it predictable aren't wrong. They're grading it against the wrong rubric. A survival thriller where you can't predict the outcome would be a different kind of movie entirely.

I gave it an 8. I'd watch it again.