LOS ANGELES April 23 (UPI) — Apex, on Netflix Friday, is a thrilling “most dangerous game” scenario. Its diversions into horror and trauma are less effective, but it comes back around for a rousing conclusion.

Sasha (Charlize Theron) loses her boyfriend (Eric Bana) climbing the Troll Wall mountain in Norway, but in her defense, he already looked quite dead before she dropped him. Five months later, she hikes and kayaks the Grand Isle Narrows in Australia.

She already has to ignore local hunters at the gas station, but Ben (Taron Egerton) follows her and steals her supplies. He gives Sasha a head start but wants to hunt her.

Most adaptations of or references to Richard Connell’s story The Most Dangerous Game involve a team of hunters with a human target. Ben doesn’t cite that the most dangerous game of all is man, but he craves the challenge Sasha represents.

The strongest part of the movie is when Sasha is on the run, dodging loud crossbow bolts, running and swimming away from Ben. Director Baltasar Kormákur and cinematographer Lawrence Sher keep the camera low to encompass the tall forests and cliffs enveloping Sasha.

There are visual effects in the movie, many artists credited in that department, but clearly a lot of Apex was authentically filmed on location. There are some close-ups of Theron in the rapids, well edited with wider angles of presumably stunt kayakers navigating the dangerous waters.

Apex gets considerably less interesting when Ben catches up to Sasha. This enables him to talk a lot more, and he just pokes her about the Troll Summit incident for some standard guilt trips.

Ben’s lair becomes more of a horror movie. Great Australian wilderness horror movies like Wolf Creek make that effective, but this wilderness adventure doesn’t call for becoming a gruesome slasher movie.

Fortunately, the climax takes an interesting turn where Sasha takes the lead again. In turn, she leads the film back to the empowering path where it began.

Survival in nature is a primal, compelling plot. Survival against a human aggressor is both physical and psychological. That would be enough for Apex, but when it is focused on either, or both, it delivers.

Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001, and a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012 and the Critics Choice Association since 2023. Read more of his work in Entertainment.