Elsa Pataky She is one of the most international Spanish actresses of the 21st century, but the truth is that she does not lavish herself excessively. Since she signed on to play Elena in ‘Fast & Furious 5’, Pataky hasn’t released ten films, and three of them are sequels to the saga led by Vin Diesel. She now returns after four years away from the cinema with ‘Interceptor’, the new action thriller from Netflix.
One very striking thing about ‘Interceptor’ is that throughout the footage it seems as if Pataky was channeling his Steven Seagal inside, but the fact is that the film itself also points in that direction on more than one occasion. In fact, except for a couple of notes that place it squarely in the current period -including a poor attempt to connect everything with the #MeToo movement-, this is a work that could perfectly have been an action show called to do more noise in video stores during the 90s than anywhere else.
Unbelievable and monotonous
The overwhelming majority of the film’s footage takes place in a closed space that the character played by Pataky has to defend against terrorists who threaten to destroy several cities in the United States. That’s where the first problem of ‘Interceptor’ arises, because there comes a point where he simply has to force the different situations more and more so that the footage can simply continue adding minutes until the appearance of the final credits at minute 90 of the film.
It is no longer so much that it can become implausible as that there does not end up being a real internal logic beyond the rivalry that arises between the characters of Pataky and Luke Bracey. And there is a very serious problem there, since the dialogues of the libretto signed by matthew reillyalso director of the film, and stuart beattie (‘Collateral’), oscillate between the monotonous and the embarrassing. And that marries very badly with the intense tone that ‘Interceptor’ shows off at all times.
There Bracey comes out somewhat better than Pataky, but his villain loses gas until he has an anticlimactic outcome. For its part, she is much more convincing in physical scenes, both when everything points to the presence of an action double and when she is the one who assumes those moments. When she has to speak, it is better not to comment, as it is a constant reminder of everything she pointed out about the similarities with one of Seagal.
Little to salvage
Unfortunately, It’s not like Reilly knows how to take advantage of it either., since ‘Interceptor’ also often shows off that trick of disguising through editing the fact that it does not have specially elaborated choreographies in the action scenes. Of course, there is the particularity that it saves the best for last, thus intensifying that tension a bit both with a confrontation with a bloody outcome and with what happens right after. It’s a pity that later that effort falls into a dry sack.
Otherwise, ‘Interceptor’ seems to want to play with the oppressive, given that the overwhelming majority of the footage takes place on a single stage, but neither does it display a staging that really enhances that feeling -sometimes it seems as if music was its only weapon to try. The feeling that remains is that it is a way of adjusting the budget to the maximum in order to add moments of danger from time to time to prevent the viewer from getting bored.
In the end, what remains is a kind of late heiress to ‘Jungla de Cristal’, but without anything that made the action movie classic starring Bruce Willis. In fact, it doesn’t even come close to ‘High Alert’, the pinnacle of Seagal’s filmography, and the only thing that redeems it slightly is the scarcity of such proposals currently with some circulation. That said, it’s always better to go back to just about any of John McTiernan’s gem ersatz rather than settle for something that gives us so little.
In short
Netflix has released many better movies than ‘Interceptor’ so far this year and I suspect that in a week we will have forgotten about it. Maybe then there will still be some talk about that rather gratuitous cameo from Chris Hemsworthalso an executive producer, because as an action film there is very little to rescue here.