Dan Stevens, Berenice Marlohe
“KILL SWITCH” My rating: C
91 minutes | MPAA rating: R
Despite the presence of A-list actor (at least after “Beauty and the Beast”) Dan Stevens, there’s no disguising the origins of “Kill Switch.”
It’s basically a first-person shooter video game. The story may have been dreamt up by writers Charlie Kindinger and Omid Nooshin, but the execution is right out of your Xbox library.
In the near future a huge energy conglomerate called Alterplex has created technology to supply Earth with unlimited electricity. This involveves building a pair of huge towers that suck energy from an alternate universe that is an exact duplicate of ours (except, we discover, everything is in reverse…like looking into a mirror).
By the way, don’t try to comprehend the “science” behind all this. It doesn’t make a damn bit of sense.
Anyway, former astronaut Will Porter (Stevens) has been recruited by Alterplex soley as a troubleshooter who, if things go wrong, will ride a capsule into the alternate universe, hopefully shutting down the towers on the other side and ending the crisis.
Anyway, we see Stevens in flashbacks of Will’s recruitment by the company and interactions with his sister and nephew, but in this alternate universe we only get his point of view. We see what he sees, and while we hear Will’s voice we can’t look at him because, well, because we’re looking out through his eyes.
Anyway, in this alternative universe Will must contend with a army of eco-terrorists who have sabotaged Alterplex’s big machine and put the whole thing into meltdown. He must dodge airborne drones that shoot at anything that moves.
There’s lots of first-person running, jumping, shooting…you get the picture.
Will is accompanied on this adventure by Abigail (Berenice Marlohe), an Alterplex executive who in the “real” world recruited him but in this one may be trying to stop him from fulfilling his mission which will, after all, bring this alternate world to an end.
Director Tim Smit does an okay job of rendering this alternate universe, but the story is way too complicated and the human beings more or less disposable.
| Robert W. Butler
Butler's Cinema Scene 