Mark Reviews Movies: INTERCEPTOR (2022)

Interceptor, Netflix

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 2, 2022

It wouldn't be honest to say that Interceptor takes itself too seriously, but co-writer/director Matthew Reilly's thriller definitely takes itself just too-seriously enough, if that makes any sense. If it doesn't, that's fine. Nothing about criticism is exactly objective science, anyway, but to put things in a different perspective, the movie clearly knows it's silly but doesn't fully embrace just how silly it actually is.

Maybe that helps, and maybe it doesn't. Either way, this movie, which is yet another example of a one-person-army taking on a group of villains in a single location, is constantly battling between the severity of its stakes and the utter ridiculousness surrounding them. The movie wants to have it both ways, and because of that, it doesn't seem to ever decide upon a firm tonal approach.

In this story, a band of terrorists have stolen 16 nuclear missiles from a facility in Russia, and their plan is to launch those weapons on 16 different cities within the United States. The only thing standing between nuclear devastation—which would be so cataclysmic that the notion the aftereffects of the destruction would be limited to the U.S. is quaintly but absurdly naïve—and not letting that happen to the country/world is a single Army officer.

None of this is especially believable, but if we held such thrillers to the standards of hard logic and science, few people would even attempt to make them. Why go through the hassle, for one thing, and on a more important level, where would be the fun in that? Reilly, an author making his directorial and screenwriting debut, and co-screenwriter Stuart Beattie seem determined to go through the hassle where it really doesn't matter. As a result, much of the potential, silly fun of this intrinsically dumb and unbelievable movie is undermined.

The background here involves the only two facilities established by the U.S. military to intercept any nuclear attack from Russia. One is in Alaska, and an opening scene shows that base having been overrun by the terrorists. That leaves only one more: a floating platform called SBX-1, which is located in a "classified" location "1,500 miles northwest of Hawaii"—so much for the top-secret part.

Returning to that facility is Capt. JJ Collins (Elsa Pataky), who is originally from Spain (Some really intrusive dialogue is plugged into an establishing shot, just to explain Pataky's accent before she says more than two words) and whose career has more or less been ruined by her proving that a high-up general is a serial sexual harasser. This assignment is her unofficial punishment from the military brass, and maybe the filmmakers should have considered that this material isn't exactly the best vehicle to examine such misogynistic abuses of power. It all feels shallow, exploitative, and patronizing.

Anyway, JJ ends up in the facility's command center when a group of terrorists—led by Alexander (Luke Bracey), the son of a wealthy businessman and ambassador to the United Nations—attacks from within, demands access to the controls, and threatens to kill anyone and everyone to get what they want. JJ holds down the fort with the help of Cpl. Shah (Mayen Mehta), lest the terrorists destroy the country's only defensive measures against the nuclear attack they're preparing.

There is some amusingly clever resourcefulness in regards to the simple stakes—some guys trying to get into a room and JJ trying to stop them—within the facility. A couple fights and shootouts erupt, giving Pataky an opportunity to show off some impressive physicality, while Reilly displays some competence in the staging (An early brawl has JJ taking on a guy much taller and more muscular than her, and she climbs up and jumps off walls to get a good angle of attack). No matter what other flaws might exist—and there are plenty, to be sure—within this movie, one has to admire the brazen silliness of the climax—which, again, involves an unimaginable nuclear holocaust—revolving around what amounts to a game of hide-and-seek. Most of the more elaborate sequences are races against a digital clock readout, ticking down the seconds while JJ fights some foe or maneuvers some obstacles, but they're effective enough.

Meanwhile, there's the stuff that Reilly takes far too seriously, relative to the over-the-top material around it. The aforementioned subplot with JJ's sexual harassment and the response to it simply doesn't fit here, and a series of flashbacks to it stop the plot's momentum dead. Meanwhile, the screenplay gives the villain a series of dastardly monologues to help clarify his motive for seeking such devastation, and if the politics of his speeches are muddled, his actual rationale makes even less sense. His attempts to convince JJ to join him for money or vengeance ring of false tension, as well.

There's more that the filmmakers take too seriously. It simply collides with, distracts from, and counteracts the core goofiness at the heart of Interceptor, which refuses to fully accept its nature to its own detriment.

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