Charlize Theron Is Almost Enough to Make Apex Worth Watching

The problem with movies in which women triumph over the men who brutalize them is that you have to watch the women being brutalized first. That’s the issue with Baltasar Kormákur’s Apex, in which Charlize Theron plays a confident, experienced adventurer who nonetheless finds herself terrorized in the Australian wilderness by a male nutter, played by Taron Egerton. The movie is sometimes thrilling; often it’s just sadistically unpleasant. But at least Theron mitigates some of the material’s problems, because she can mitigate pretty much any movie’s problems. Even when you want to look away from the movie’s glimpses of rusty meat hooks and bloated corpses,  there’s no way to keep your eyes off Theron.

Theron’s Sasha is the kind of woman you know you don’t need to worry about. In the movie’s opening scene, she shows phenomenal muscle strength and perseverance as she scales the imposing, snow-dotted Norwegian rock face known as Troll Wall. Whose butt couldn’t she kick? But that early scene also reveals the tragedy that has scarred Sasha: Her partner both in life and all sorts of thrill-seeking adventures, Tommy (Eric Bana), doesn’t make it up that rock face, and Sasha feels partly responsible for his death. Earlier, huddled in their tiny tent, he’d revealed to her that he wanted to slow things down; he’d become tired of tagging along in her ceaseless quest for the ultimate adrenaline rush. In Sasha’s eyes, their spark somehow both sharp and muted, you can see that she fears he’s becoming tired not just of their shared adventures but of her. And all this happens before the movie’s opening credits. Theron is a supremely economical actor. She can outline a character’s significant traits in the space of a few seconds, which may be why she’s so great at playing action heroes. She doesn’t have a moment to waste.