ZERO (2025) - Mark Reviews Movies

Zero, Well Go USA

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 11, 2025

Zero features quite the setup, in which two American men on a trip to Senegal each ends up with a bomb strapped to his chest. Co-writer/director Jean Luc Herbulot's movie begins as a race-against-the-clock thriller, as the men try to stop the explosives from detonating, and gradually becomes a strange, confounding, and ultimately nihilistic political treatise.

The shift isn't intrinsically a bad thing, and Herbulot and co-star Hus Miller's screenplay makes some salient points during its forceful foray into politics. This is clearly meant to push some buttons, and if the story came across as a bit more coherent and the political ideas felt a little less as if they're trying to incense, the movie might have worked as both a thriller and a statement.

Instead, we get a simplistic and shallow effort on both counts. The thriller part makes little sense, because the movie's mind is focused on the point it wants to make, and the movie's political diatribe seems to exist to be provocative for its own sake, because it has to say what it wants to say within the confines and context of an over-the-top, high-stakes plot.

The story begins with an American man waking up on a bus in Senegal's capital city of Dakar. He has no memory of what happened to him after arriving at the airport, and after some other passengers point out that he has arrived at the stop written on a sign around his neck and hanging over his chest, the guy realizes there's a bomb on him. It is locked in place and starts counting down from ten hours.

The first sign, perhaps, that the movie has little interest in operating like the kind of thriller this premise might suggest from the start is that we're barely introduced to either of the men with a bomb attached him before the plot's gears start moving. They don't even have names. The guy on the bus is only known as "Bomb #1" (Miller), and the other man, who is already moving throughout the city based on news reports in the background, is called, naturally, "Bomb #2" (Cam McHarg).

The former wears a suit and tries to convince anyone who attempts to or does detain him that he works for clients with a lot of money and knows how to obtain that cash to get out of trouble. He's in Dakar, however, for a private matter, having to do with a woman he met here some years ago. The latter man is dressed in a red sweatshirt and seems quite at ease doing assorted questionable or outright illegal things, and the very little we learn of #2 is that he was a Los Angeles-based criminal who killed people for a bag filled with cash.

Apart from learning one important detail about the reason #1 is in Dakar, that's it in terms of any back story for the men. The plot follows the two, first separately and eventually together, as they avoid police, receive instructions by way of a cellphone, and perform various "jobs" for the voice on the other end of the line. Willem Dafoe provides the voice of the anonymous taskmaster, who basically wants them to deliver items—or, in #2's case, a person—to various people in the city and perform some mission on behalf of those people. If they each do five jobs, the voice says he'll stop the timers, and he's keeping tabs on their actions by way of a drone flying in the sky.

This is all relatively straightforward, but soon enough, it becomes apparent that the voice on the phone is being a little cagey with information, such as the existence of other bombs, and intentionally unclear about what end all of these missions are supposed to reach. We're never certain, either, why #1 has to steal a cellphone from a local wrestler, #2 delivers a bound-and-gagged man to a restaurant, or both have to pretend to be drug dealers to infiltrate a safe haven for young gangster in order to free an imam from captivity. All of it is vaguely connected to revelations near the end of the movie, but since Herbulot's goal is to surprise us with those details, the entire thing comes across as a puzzle with too many pieces intentionally hidden or missing to put it together.

Anyway, the real purpose of the movie isn't the running around, the guys' efforts to figure out how to disarm the bombs on their own, or the jobs they're forced to perform. It's to make a statement, using these two empty vessels of characters as semi-satirical stand-ins for United States foreign policy and global economic imbalance. This is a lot for any movie, particularly an 80-or-so-minute thriller, to communicate effectively, and Zero is so caught up in its efforts to keep the momentum going and to shock that its message feels as half-considered as its plotting.

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