Who Thought This Was a Good Idea?

I will never in a million years understand how Sacrifice got greenlit, but I am beginning to understand why Netflix film chief Dan Lin was fired this week. If he had anything to do with the decision to acquire this movie, he deserved to lose his job. This isn’t just a stinker. It’s an inexplicable stinker, the kind of movie that makes you want to subpoena the pitch meeting. Who thought this was a good idea? Why did Chris Evans, Anya Taylor-Joy, Salma Hayek, Sam Richardson, and Charli XCX, among others, sign on? It can’t have been the money. This isn’t a big-budget production. It’s a festival movie, and one of the worst-reviewed festival movies of the year, at that. The only explanation I can come up with is that someone convinced them a premise this bad would somehow transcend itself in the hands of a French director.

It does not. It is an embarrassment.

Here’s the setup: Chris Evans plays Mike Tyler, a movie star whose public crashout went viral. (It involved a flamethrower. Don’t ask.) In the middle of a comeback attempt, he attends a benefit gala for the environment and digs himself an even deeper hole by storming the stage and delivering a painfully cringe speech about how fake all the millionaires in the room are.

Meanwhile, Anya Taylor-Joy plays Joan, the leader of an eco-terrorist cult convinced that sacrificing three people to a volcano will save humanity … from the volcano. Joan kidnaps Mike, who at first believes he’s simply playing a role, lending his celebrity to convince the authorities of the nobility of her cause. Eventually, though, he comes around, or at least comes to believe that the only way to salvage his career and his reputation is to throw himself into the volcano.

Charli XCX is in there somewhere, playing Mother Nature. John Malkovich shows up as Joan’s father, who tries to talk her out of her lunacy and fails. Mike plays along, hatching a plan to be rescued at the last second, but… spoilers… Joan’s sheer commitment to the bit persuades him to leap to his death anyway. And guess what? The volcano doesn’t erupt and wipe out the planet. After Mike and Joan jump in, it goes dormant.

And that’s it. That’s the movie. A washed-up movie star throws himself into a volcano to save humanity from a volcano that only a delusional cult leader believes is going to destroy mankind. And that washed-up movie star is played by Chris Evans.

What makes it so galling is that Sacrifice clearly thinks it’s in on the joke. It wants to skewer celebrities who mistake self-regard for activism, rich people who treat the climate crisis as a branding opportunity, and the cult of the grand public gesture. But the movie never notices that it’s the very thing it’s mocking. Sacrifice is Mike Tyler’s gala speech stretched to feature length: a roomful of famous, wealthy people flying to a volcano to deliver a self-satisfied lecture about the planet, then congratulating themselves for their courage. It’s not satire. It’s just dumb.

It’s not just cringey. It’s Gal Gadot singing “Imagine” cringey. Only instead of five minutes, it lasts an hour and a half.