★★
“Lacking in military intelligence”
A promising idea has its concept snuffed out by shaky execution and even worse writing. Sam (Rogers) is a former solder and now single mother. When her child falls sick, Sam heads for the chemist’s for medicine. She never gets there, being abducted in a van and rendered unconscious. She wakes in a large warehouse-like facility in the middle of nowhere, which turns out to be a military production facility. She’s not the only woman there, and finds that an invisible adversary, using advanced tech to cloak his presence, is taking advantage of the weekend to turn the place into a stalker’s amusement park. However, Sam’s background perhaps gives her a very particular set of skills, unavailable to the other victims.
I’m generally fairly oblivious to script-holes: Chris is considerably better at spotting them. But here, even I could see the glaring flaws. This is supposedly a cutting-edge military facility, yet the security is so bad, a child can literally get in. The motivation for the villain is poorly drawn, and it’s never explained how the lowly caretaker – for that’s what he is – manages to get to use all of his wonderful toys. Do the army also let soldiers take tanks off to drive around on the weekend? But it’s not as if the film has any confidence in him as a bad guy, for even after Sam has managed to avoid his threat, she then has to handle a military drone. Just one – for like I say, security is pretty bad. And it can easily be taken out with a conveniently to hand brick. If we ever go to war, I swear, we are screwed…
If the film had made much of Sam’s background, supposedly in the engineers’ corps, that might have helped. Watching her MacGyver her way against her opponent, using the plentiful material at hand could have been fun. But that would have required thought, something largely absent from the script. There are few points at which we are ever convinced of her military background, and the scenes where she is “fighting” her invisible opponent, all too often reminded me of the Monty Python sketch about self-wrestling. It’s a shame, as Rogers is by no means terrible otherwise, and is quite empathetic.
The same cannot be said for the ending, however. It’s understandable that the writer-director felt the need to tack something on, after the considerably underwhelming confrontation with the drone. What he delivers is the ultra-cliched finale where someone isn’t who they seem to be, but turns out to be the killer. No, those are not a pair of fidget spinners, they are my eyes rolling at this “twist”. At least he has the good grace not to stretch this out, bringing things to a ending that is brisk to the extreme. It’s clear the budget on this was limited, and I forgive it that. The lazy plotting is considerably harder to forgive.
Dir: Justin Edgar
Star: Rebecca Rogers, Nathalie Buscombe, Ian Sharp, Laurence Saunders