Review of the movie Interceptor The latest Netflix movie is a thinly-veiled propaganda effort that cannot be saved by any number of celebrity cameos since it is cheap, trite, and stars a subpar performance by Elsa Pataky in the lead role.
Tom Cruise’s valiant pilot destroys the enemy’s airstrip before launching an attack on their territory in the recent Top Gun: Maverick. The enemy was already damaged by the time it realised what was happening. Similar in setup, the recent Netflix thriller Interceptor reaches its pinnacle in the first few seconds as it is hammering out this intriguing notion in letters on the screen.
The opening scenes of the film inform us that the US has two covert facilities built exclusively to intercept and destroy Russian warheads. A Russian nuclear missile would need 24 minutes to reach the United States, while the US would only have 12 minutes to find and shoot down the missile. As our main character, JJ, moves to the second base, one of those bases is being overrun by Russian terrorists at the start of the film. Whether she likes it or not, she will be the last person standing between the rogue elements and the command centre when the second base, which she is unaware of, is also taken over by them. What a difficult first day of work.
Silly movie that tries to appear sophisticated
Inexpensive, tacky, and poorly executed, Interceptor is a ticking time bomb of a thriller. Elsa Pataky is out of her element as JJ, a character who is theoretically in every frame of the picture. JJ is a veteran of the Fast and Furious franchise, where she typically featured for one or two scenes per film. She does well in the fistfight portions of the movie, which are astonishingly amateurish given that Sam Hargrave from Extraction is involved, but she falters when she is asked to engage in syrupy melodrama. Interceptor, a silly B-movie that wants to appear sophisticated, offers JJ an unneeded history that it then forces down the audience’s throats.
We are informed that JJ was sexually harassed by a general in the past, but nothing was done about it. Instead, she received criticism for drawing attention to his actions. In essence, the job at the interceptor base is a punishment posting. While bringing attention to this noble (and underreported) fact is important, Interceptor rarely knows how to do it delicately. Funny enough, it’s also the kind of movie that can’t wait for JJ to change out of her military uniform and into something much more scanty. In less than ten minutes, she tears it off and spends the rest of the movie in her undershirt, which is also thoroughly wet—at least until the very end of the movie.
The villain announces his plans
The villain in this movie also announces his plans to the world rather than, you know, quietly carrying them out? When the movie decides that this is the perfect opportunity to cram in a celebrity cameo, which, perplexingly, is played for laughs, it further undermines the tension in the scenario. By the way, there are no awards for guessing the celebrity’s identity if you already know who Pataky is. Later, the villain snorts, “This is what I was trained for, psy-ops, military intelligence, uncover your enemy’s vulnerability and exploit it!” as he holds JJ’s loved one hostage in an effort to extort her into giving up.
This movie might be described as one of those instances where something is “so horrible that it’s good.” I’ll cut you off there. It is still horrible because it is so bad. For instance, Shershaah has superior visual effects than this movie, which seemed to have cost $500 to produce. Even that, as it turns out, feels like a waste.