In 2021's Apex, the Wealthy Hunt the Most Dangerous Game: a Sleepy Bruce Willis in a Bright Red Jacket
In 2021 Bruce Willis somewhat perplexingly starred in a direct-to-streaming cheapie called Survive the Game and a movie with the same premise as the 1994 “The Most Dangerous Game” riff Surviving the Game that are not the same movie. That’s not unlike how Willis and Chad Michael Murray starred together in movies titled Survive the Game and Survive the Night in consecutive years that otherwise have nothing to do with one another.
The titles of Willis’ seven 2021 stinkers are a curious combination of arbitrary, generic, interchangeable, perfunctory and unnecessarily confusing. Then again, that’s true of the films themselves as well. So the almost impressively idiotic, caveman simple names of Willis’ late period nadirs do an all effective job of conveying the essence of the lazy, cynical product they’re haphazardly slapped on.
Survive the Game would be a much better title for Apex, since it involves a convict played by Bruce Willis trying to survive a deadly game that finds him being hunted by six sociopaths, each sicker and more sadistic than the last, who paid handsomely for the privilege of hunting the MOST DANGEROUS GAME: MAN.
If that plot sounds familiar, it’s because it’s also the premise of the 1997 John Leguizamo vehicle The Pest as well as nearly two dozen other motion pictures, including 1934’s The Most Dangerous Game and John Woo’s terrific American debut, 1993’s Hard Target.
In his lazy old age, Bruce Willis is the anti-Tom Cruise. Half of the excitement of watching Mission Impossible sequels comes from knowing that the magical sprite at the center of the franchise is actually doing all of his own crazy stunts and acts of extreme bravery, that he is risking death at every turn to entertain audiences that, quite frankly, probably don’t deserve it.
Bruce Willis, in sharp contrast, doesn’t seem willing to risk breaking a sweat or getting winded.
One of Bruce Willis’ many shortcomings as an action star is his seeming unwillingness to do any action. In the films I’ve watched for this project he’s generally seated and tired-looking.
Willis seems primarily concerned with not wasting more effort or time than is absolutely necessary. He’s perpetually in energy-conservation mode.
Tupac’s unexpected cameo is the best part of Apex.
The Pulp Fiction star ostensibly spends Apex on the run from sadistic hunters as convict-of-the-future Thomas Malone but the best he can muster is a slow, half-hearted jog.
When the hunters see their prey for the first time, they are appropriately and predictably unimpressed by the sixty-something man with the everyman physique.
But they are assured in increasingly hyperbolic terms that he is no mere mortal but rather the most dangerous man alive, a Jason Bourne-like figure wanted by law enforcement everywhere for his legendary transgressions.
jail attire.
The filmmakers flagrantly flout the dictum “show, don’t tell” by having their characters constantly talk about what an impossibly formidable badass Malone is and how impressed and intimidated by him they are without ever showing him doing anything even moderately impressive, let alone superhuman.
We’re told that he’s “broken laws you haven’t heard of before.” I can only imagine what these obscure transgressions might be: selling marmalade to a tabby cat without a permit? Dressing up like a Vicar without approval from the church? Antagonizing endangered species?
Thomas Malone is downright Mackivity-like in the extent of his misdeeds.
It certainly does not help that the convict inexplicably wears jeans and an unflattering sweater in the solitary confinement cell where he has been kept for seven years because he’s so “dangerous” and “deadly.”
When he’s being hunted by the worst people in the world the freedom-hungry senior citizen sports a bright red bomber jacket that makes him both easy to spot from a distance (which, needless to say, is not a positive when you are being hunted by sport) and also incredibly unthreatening.
If The Terminator were perpetually clad in a bright red bomber jacket with zippers no one would be scared of him. Yet Apex dresses its ostensibly super tough and super cool hero up in normcore/dadcore fashions while he half-asses it through various wooded areas yet expects us to be blown away by him because its characters never stop talking about him representing physical and psychological perfection.
nice jacket, jackass!
When the hunters complain that their prey is a slight man in his mid-sixties, the fetching hologram lady preceding over the proceedings says of Malone, “Pardon my French, but the man is a motherfucker.”
Apex lazily borrows from its star’s backstory by giving him a series of injuries referencing Die Hard, 12 Monkeys and Unbreakable, from that long-ago era when Willis made movies that captured the public imagination, movies that mattered. It’s a tongue-in-cheek way to link this disposable schlock to Willis’ golden era by positing him, metatexually, as a man the universe cannot kill no matter how badly it might want to.
West (Alexia Fast), the cynical, slinky hologram lady that runs the hunt gives her hunters the alert and they all come together for an opportunity to experience the exhilaration of transgressing all known laws of man by killing humans for pleasure.
The convict chosen as prey asks West if hunters can kill each other as well as himself and she says that it’s one hundred percent legal for hunters to off each other in addition to Malone. This malevolent seed soon bears murderous fruit when the hunters decide to spend most of their time taunting, manipulating, lying and ultimately killing each other rather than their ostensible target.
Apex makes the very obvious point that people are sick and cruel and inspired by a toxic combination of power, cruelty and a desperate need for control, particularly those who feel the need to hunt humans for sport, then makes it again and again as hunters become the hunted and kill each other off one by one.
A sinister preppie in a pink Izod shirt played by Lochlyn Munro of Dead Man on Campus is the first to go. That’s too bad, because his goofy ad-libs lend the movie a comic element it’s otherwise missing.
As in Midnight in the Switchgrass and Fortress Willis is blown offscreen by a villain who cranks the energy and menace up to ten while the hero is barely awake.
The great character actor Neal McDonough is terrific as Dr. Samuel Rainsford, a dead-eyed sociopath who lives for the hunt and gets off on killing as many people as possible, including his wife.
McDonough brings a lot of dark charisma to a movie Willis lazily sleepwalks through. Looking at the plot summary of Apex I thought I had finally come across a 2021 Bruce Willis movie that did not cast him as a cop.
I was wrong! Before he became a super-criminal and super-prisoner Malone was, you guessed it, a police officer. That makes it five for five. Every single movie I’ve written about for this project has cast him as a law enforcement agent.
I only have two more films to go in Cosmic Sin and Deadlock. Will they ALSO cast Willis as a cop of some sort? Judging by their Wikipedia entries, it seems like that’s not the case but I thought that of Apex as well and that ended up being yet another Bruce Willis cop movie, albeit of a different sort.
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