Fix: Cheesy Action Movies, Romance Of Convenience, You Miss The White Walker Monsters From GOT
Platform: AppleTV+
AppleTV+ Summary:
Two highly-trained operatives become close after being sent to protect opposite sides of a mysterious gorge. When an evil emerges, they must work together to survive what lies within.
FYA Summary:
Drasa and Levi are expert snipers chosen for a super secret mission: a year-long stint of protection detail at The Gorge. Protection against what? Don’t worry about it! Two giant concrete towers with no blinds are sat on either side of a smoke-filled slash of earth, and our duo is required to keep watch, check the perimeters, and keep whatever the eff is down there from coming up here, with big-ass guns and floating mines, if necessary.
This is exciting for about a week, and then Drasa and Levi realize their high-powered binoculars can stare directly into the other person’s tower, and it just so happens there’s a VERY hot person on the other end. As sparks—and bullets!—begin to fly between the two, they decide it’s worth taking some extreme risks for nookie, which, if they’d watched any horror movies before this, they should know is an EXTREMELY BAD IDEA.
Familiar Faces:
Miles Teller as Levi, Anya Taylor-Joy as Drasa
There is just something about Miles Teller’s acting that leaves me cold, personally, but I will be generous and say he’s aging better than I expected. His American military sniper character, Levi, is the clichést of clichés: when we first meet him, he’s isolated, depressed (ya know, from all the contract killings), and refuses to find a new career that doesn’t make him want to drink himself to death.
Anya Taylor-Joy as an actress is also just “fine” to me, (You now may be asking, so WHY did you watch this movie where they are basically the only characters then? And I’ll ask you to mind ya business.) but her Lithuanian sniper, Drasa, is a bit more fun to watch than Levi. She’s also sad, but more about her dying father than her many kills.
Their romance is basic and cute enough, as they first interact through written messages and binoculars and gun play (like ya do), but then later it’s more about running for their lives than making out.
Sigourney Weaver as Bartholomew
Sigourney is deep in her cameo-where-she-potentially-plays-a-shady-villain era, and I’m here for it! She can always command a screen.
Couch-Sharing Capability: One Is The Loneliest Number
Where would our protagonists be if only one of them had to guard the Gorge? So find yourself at least one friend or beau to watch this with! You’ll want someone around to discuss the improbable action sequences where no one even gets a scrape on them despite being surrounded by seven or more baddies.
Recommended Level of Inebriation: Moonshine
I watched this movie high on cold meds and can confirm: You don’t need to be sober to follow the plot points; it’ll work at any intoxication level. If you want to be on theme, then you’ll break out some small-batch moonshine, but remember YOU aren’t stuck in a dank concrete tower, so add in some mixers!
Once you’re a bit toasty, let’s discuss how these Gorge towers—where they take your phone, watches, and anything else that can be connected to the internet before you go—have modern media (in the form of vinyl records, but still). Levi had to literally parachute out of a plane and hike for a day to get to his tower. Was he allowed to stuff some records into his backpack for his amusement?? Do they bring in some modern-day books and media and such periodically to help with the boredom? Because I really need to know how Drasa has a record of the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s “Spitting Off the Edge of the World” to seduce Levi to!?
Use of Your Streaming Subscription: Fine
Well, “fine” if you are streaming in a perfectly dark room on a calibrated device. Some parts of this movie are SO DAMN DARK, and I am not normally someone who complains about that too much as I’ve found the right combo that works for me in most cases, but SHEESH. That scene with Sigourney and Miles in the boardroom at the beginning of the movie might as well have been audio only (I lightened that photo above considerably). It does get marginally better as the movie goes on, but be warned.
This is a B-movie at best and not something I’d go to the theater for (which is hardly anything in this day-and-age’s price-point), but it’s not the worse thing I’ve streamed over the last year. It kept my attention, even as the last third—where all the big action moments come into play and the secrets of the Gorge get revealed and the logic of what happened starts to break down if you look at it for more than three seconds—gets extremely cheesy. At this point in the cesspool that is 2025, I will take any form of escapism media that lets me take my mind off of the real world for a few minutes.
Well, now I have to watch this.