Interceptor (2022)

2022 98 Minutes

A U.S. Army Captain uses her years of tactical training to save humanity from sixteen nuclear missiles launched at the U.S. as a violent attack threatens her remote missile interceptor station.

Overall Rating

2 / 10

Verdict: Awful

User Review

d_riptide

2 / 10

‘Interceptor’ is basically a wannabe ‘B-movie’ that isn’t satisfied with settling for the bare minimum but no amount of propaganda masquerading does enough to disguise the exercise in tedium with this malodorous tripe.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen a production design this chintzy on purpose and what baffles me is that this was meant to be as 90’s old-fashioned as possible. Sure, the singular room concept did help to build a LITTLE tension since, again, the lack of any viable locations will force you to get creative with the one you got but that gets undercut almost immediately by a constant propulsion of plot holes that director Matthew Reilly seems almost non-complacent about; he doesn’t seem to try to work around the gaping content. Both Elsa Pataky and Luke Bracey are shallow to the core despite the formers dedication, the scope and scale of the movie doesn’t seem to match the confined premise they have, CG looks laughable, musical score is generic, characters have no personality, the tone seems to be clashing at odds with each other every other second and clunky cliched dialogue aside, the less I yapper on about the flat, shockingly haphazard fight scenes and it’s obvious choreography, the better.

One of the worst things you can do with a movie is sacrifice any potential depth and ingenuity of its story and reduce its focal point to something so flat and 2D. Interceptor tries to get around that barricade by spreading some sprinkles on top one message with another, resulting in a screenplay defined by nothing else BUT it’s message. And the sad thing is you still could’ve won me over with it if you did SOMETHING meaningful with it; I know I sound like a broken record regarding this but why are these messages so hard to portray?

The film barely provides lip service to challenging racist, sexist, and anti-capitalist ideologies and as noble (and underreported) as those truths are to highlight, the writers hardly know how to treat it sensitively or do everything in their power to bury it under whatever rubble they can find. Dumbing them down didn’t help matters either.

The only major saving grace here is that it’s only 98 minutes long.

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