Many a movie misfires because it doesn’t have a firm enough sense of identity and it never sticks the landing on a particular genre. Is it trying to be a thriller with elements of comedy, an action pic with serious dramatic overtones, a mystery wrapped inside a romance? In an effort to be too many things, it becomes less than the sum of its parts.
What I admired about the electric and kinetic and bat-bleep bonkers sci-fi horror actioner “The Gorge” is that it knows EXACTLY what it wants to be, even as it switches genres more frequently than Taylor Swift changed costumes on the Eras Tour. One moment, we are squarely in a particular genre, with director Scott Derrickson (“Doctor Strange,” “Black Phone”) and writer Zach Dean (“The Tomorrow War”) leaning into the tropes accompanying said genre. A couple of scenes later, and we’re in an entirely different kind of movie, and either you embrace the sheer and unapologetic lunacy of it all or you don’t.
I’m going to tread lightly so as not to spoil too many of the twists and turns, but I will say it’s not often you experience a film that at times plays like a rom-com from the 1990s spliced with something from the John Carpenter playbook.
I’m pretty sure there’s no real-world data to back me up on this, but my guess is that fewer than .01% of the world’s workforce consists of former assassins who have gone off the grid and are trying to live a regular life, and/or hit-persons who are experiencing some sort of existential crisis.
However, in Movie and TV Land, the job of Highly Trained Operative is quite common. This time around, Miles Teller is Levi, an elite American sniper who has moved from the military to private contract work but still does the occasional job for the Marine Corps, while Anya Taylor-Joy is Drasa, a Lithuanian sniper who is at least Levi’s equal when it comes to taking down targets with a single shot from distances in excess of 3,500 meters. (Talk about a Swipe Right match!)
The eminent Sigourney Weaver gives the proceedings some instant gravitas as Bartholomew, who is some sort of powerful spook overseeing the western side of the most crucial covert operation the modern world has ever known. Turns out there’s a gigantic gorge in an undisclosed location — a gorge only a handful of world leaders and military personnel know about — and every year, new operatives are assigned to the two enormous towers overlooking the gorge.
Levi accepts the post on the West Tower, while Drasa takes position in the East Tower. (The towers are stockpiled with weapons and look like they could have been designed by László Tóth from “The Brutalist.” They were constructed somewhere around the end of World War II, and the operation has been ongoing ever since then, with new guards rotating every 12 months.)
Every 30 days, Levi will do a radio check-in with his supervisors, while Drasa will do the same with hers. Other than that, no technology is allowed; no phones, no Wi-Fi, no communication with the outside world — and also, Levi and Drasa are forbidden from contacting each other, in any way. (As for that last rule, we have a high-powered action movie starring two of the most talented and attractive younger actors on the planet; it’s not much of a spoiler to reveal Levi and Drasa actually do make contact, in increasingly intimate fashion. I mean, come on!)
For a good chunk of time, “The Gorge” plays like a romance in which the two leads just happen to be highly trained killers with dark pasts and uncertain futures. (“Sometimes the one thing you need the most, has been in your sights all along …”) Teller and Taylor-Joy have a sizzling chemistry, but there’s only so much time for love when you’ve been assigned to keep whatever is in that gorge from escaping the gorge, and whatever it is, there are a LOT of them.
Working from an outlandish and boldly creative screenplay by Zach Dean, director Derrickson does a masterful job of staging major action set pieces involving hailstorms of bullets as well as some intense hand-to-hand combat sequences. Along the way, the mysteries of “The Gorge” are unveiled, which leads to some spectacularly grotesque imagery. This is a great-looking movie with star-power leads, and not for a second is any of it even close to being plausible, and we’re just fine with that. You can leave the Logic Meter behind when you enter “The Gorge,” and you’ll have a great time.