It's movie premiere season for online services. Netflix will bring us many new releases with famous actors. From action movies filmed in Prague, to sitcoms. One of the first new releases that can be seen on their 4K TVs is the drama Spiderhead.
This is the film currently getting the most hype from director Joseph Kosinski, who has bounced around since making his latest Top Gun to less action-packed films and smaller-budget movies.
To put it bluntly, the lead star, who certainly cost a lot of millions of dollars to make, is Thor's Chris Hemsworth, who is one of the brightest stars of the moment. He's not only an action star, but he's also one of the very good actors who can handle the comedic version of his character.
The other star is Miles Teller, who is at the birth of a newer generation of actors, he's 35 years old, and he's just definitely one of the actors who will either make it big or become a forgotten star.
And now for a bit of backstory, a new chemical is being tested in an alternative prison on an island. Substances that cause infatuation, depression and other feelings. But it's not just about testing, and over time, human personality is tested too, and all is not as it seems behind the walls.
Screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick also wrote the script for the chatty Deadpool, and so it's clear that the film doesn't focus on action, but on words and actions. It's also clear that the film was an original book by George Saunders, and so the book's premise stands out even more.
But I have to criticize the film for unfortunately not being an action movie that impresses with precise action. The director's efforts at psychological passages have failed, not that the actors can't act, they can act and Chris Hemsworth can handle his positions convincingly, but he certainly lacks a piece to play his character perfectly. He is, after all, an action-comedy actor who isn't playing Shakespeare.
Miles Teller plays his character, sadly, the same way all the time, a prisoner who is tired of his stereotypical life with tests.
The rest of the cast are just by-the-numbers, totally serviceable. They're just there for the purpose of fleshing out the characters, or as a "love" to suffer or die for.
The first half of the film feels like a psychological drama, but once the first death and the first epiphany of Prisoner #1 occurs, things start to pick up. Unfortunately too fast paced and utterly boring, no psychological drama, just an escape and a couple of very dull fights.
I don't know much of Joseph Kosinski's work, I know he's most good at action scenes, the new Tron and Top Gun could tell a story, but unfortunately he's not as skilled in his other films. Whether it's just Tom Cruise's production efforts to make Kosinski's last few films cult, I don't know, but the penultimate film, Spiderhead, is a completely mediocre film in which you can't even see the "cult" director's "cultishness" and is just one of the weak average online services. If it hadn't starred a contemporary action star, it would have been even weaker and certainly less successful.
Original article June 19, 2022 – Kritiky.cz
