Apex Review: Bruce Willis Does Little To Elevate Messy, Derivative Genre Cliché

[Night hunter]

Mindlessly stretched out to pad the runtime, Apex is a stupendously dull, feeble ghost of what a gritty Bruce Willis action starrer could have been.

Bruce Willis, apart from being an iconic action star, has been a part of a fair share of commendable sci-fi offerings, with The Fifth Element, Looper, and 12 Monkeys emerging as genre-defining classics in their own right. Lately, Willis has been churning out a sizable number of projects, including Midnight in the Switch Grass and Survive the Game. Unfortunately, the end results have been mixed, or middling at best. However, Edward Drake’s Apex, also known as Apex Predator, situates Willis in a way that completely robs him of his former glory, resulting in a science fiction thriller that is tedious and derivative in terms of narrative and execution. Mindlessly stretched out to pad the runtime, Apex is a stupendously dull, feeble ghost of what a gritty Bruce Willis action starrer could have been.

Apex opens in the midst of a hunt, wherein a group of hunters seems to be chasing a man within the depths of the forest. Once the prey is killed by one of the hunters, trillionaire Samuel Rainsford (Neal McDonough) collects the head of the man as a personal trophy. Right off the bat, the visual cues hint towards the fact that the events of Apex are set in the future, owing to a crackling transportation device and the presence of West (Alexia Fast), who only appears in holographic form throughout the course of the film. Apex is posited as a shadow entity removed from the “real” world, hosting games on a private island wherein hunters are assigned a prey, who needs to be killed before a stipulated time period. West acts as gamekeeper at Apex, looking to recruit a challenging prey for the next game, when she is made aware of ex-cop Thomas Malone (Willis), now imprisoned for a crime he did not commit.