Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Jason Adams | Film | April 24, 2026
Once upon a time, in a land not so far away—Hollywoodland, twas called—there were these things called “mid-budget movies” and the picture-houses were positively crammed full of them. Two, three would open every single weekend—cinematic fluff mostly, often totally forgettable, but it turns out that they were the life-blood of the moviegoing experience. In the mid-90s (aka the era where I first grew my cinematic sealegs) we’re talking films like (off the top of my head) Cliffhanger, Johnny Mnemonic, Blown Away, In the Line of Fire, The River Wild. Serviceable movie-star vehicles that disappeared ninety minutes of your life in ways you were totally good with.
That loud dumb miasma of B-movies gave everybody something to see at the theater, if they so decided to stumble into one from the harsh summer heat—it didn’t have to be a four-quadrant tentpole up the bum every single time. These things would cost 20 to 30 million bucks mostly, and they’d usually make that money back and then some—anyway there were enough of the ones that did to pay for the ones that didn’t. That perfectly sustainable business model served the land o’ Hollywood well for a very long time. It felt like the people bankrolling the movies actually cared about “the movies.” It was nice!
It’s not just the fact that Apex, the new thriller from Everest director Baltasar Kormákur hitting Netflix this weekend, feels like the mashing up of two of the above mentioned popcorn flicks (Cliffhanger and The River Wild to be precise) that had me awash in all of this mid-90s movie nostalgia.
Part of it is also the luxury that I actually got to see this deeply old-school movie—which sees Charlize Theron running around the wilderness of backwoods Australia with Taron Egerton—on a proper big screen. The way absolutely none of the rest of you will be able to. This movie lands on Netflix today, globally, sinking immediately into the muck of its small-screened algorithm where maybe it’ll pop up for you, maybe it won’t, who knows? Maybe that inch-tall Charlize thumbnail will grab somebody’s attention and they’ll play with their phone and take ten bathroom breaks during it, and that’ll be all they wrote on Apex from now until we’re dust again.
And that’s a dang shame. It’s not that anybody’s missing out on some masterpiece. Apex isn’t some surprise work of staggering art. But it’s exactly the sort of solid star-vehicle spectacle that we’d apparently been taking for granted back in the day—it’s a lean mean ninety minutes of B-movie toss-and-tumbling, with two gorgeous and immensely watchable actors whacking each other in the head with rocks and jumping off cliffs among some truly transporting landscapes and cinematography. Apex is what the movies used to be!
I’ve never seen Australia look like this before. Shot on location in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales, this isn’t Charlize running around the brown Australian outback of Mad Max Fury Road at all. It’s a world lush and green, full of rivers for her outdoorsy character of Sasha to thrillingly kayak down, and peaks for Sasha to scale where, once she summits, the view will look like some foggy misty Myst kinda gorgeousness in every conceivable direction.
And Kormákur (who clearly took some lessons home with him about filming vertiginous nature on Everest) along with his D.P. Lawrence Sher (who shot the Joker movies) shoot the hell out of this continually surprising landscape. The action scenes are tight, exciting, propulsive—there are shots of Charlize hanging off rock-walls here that had me absolutely dizzy in the movie theater… all of which I can only assume will be almost completely lost during a home screen “experience.” It’s really a legitimate loss!
There’s not much meat on the bones of Apex’s plot (nor should there be) which is why I’ve put it off until now—basically Sasha goes kayaking in the Australian wilderness where she meets a cute little weirdo named Ben (Egerton) and… the two of them have some adventures there, the end. Yes there are twists to that extraordinarily basic synopsis that are so obvious you will all see them coming from miles away. It’s just I don’t want to spoil them, even though they’re so thuddingly obvious, lest the dumb thrill of having that “I knew it, I knew I was right” tingle that these kinds of movies thrum with slips away from anyone.
Because that’s totally part of the fun of these kinds of movies. It’s part and parcel the charm. You’re always a step ahead of Apex, but the movie’s so fleet it makes you feel like you’re running alongside one another anyway. Theron and Egerton both give winningly watchable turns in roles that mostly require them to be running and bleeding a lot, but the action does slow down a few times where they can remind us that oh right, these are actual actors. Sasha and Ben, to the movie’s betterment, both live and breathe and seem genuine enough. Nobody’s winning any Oscars and nobody’s making a billion bucks, but once upon a time movies didn’t have to do either of those things to justify themselves. So please—make some popcorn and turn off the lights and enjoy this nostalgic thrill-ride where, and while, you can. They really don’t make ‘em like this anymore.
