A Rough Experiment
The workday just got a whole lot gorier in this decent but uninspired thriller
Imagine you showed up for work one day to discover a new corporate policy that required you to off your coworkers before one of them managed to ice you. That’s right: The Belko Experiment puts the “off ” and the “ice” in office politics.
It puts the “ick” in there as well, given the gruesome way this thinly sketched scenario is carried out. The film opens on a weekday morning with the arrival of some 80 American workers to the eight-storey Belko building in Bogota, Colombia. The expat satellite office sits well back from the road, surrounded by a chain-link fence and nestled next to an old hanger that apparently none of the workers ever thought to ask about.
Meet nice-guy Mike (John Gallagher Jr.), his office-romance Leandra (Adria Arjona), security desker Evan (James Earl), and maintenance guys Bud and Lonny (Michael Rooker and David Dastmalchian). Sean Gunn plays the weed-smoking Marty.
Tony Goldwyn plays Barry Norris, the highest-ranking company man in the building. And John C. McGinley ramps up his signature grin as Wendell, that creepy employee you just know would kill people if he had a chance. Which this film duly gives him.
The last character of note is Melonie Diaz as Dany. Her position as the new hire gives the film a reason to explain that every Belko employee has a tracking device placed in the back of their neck, purportedly to let the authorities find them if they’re kidnapped. We soon learn that the trackers can also explode and kill their hosts.
Before you can say “morning smoke break,” the intercom announces two employees need to be killed within the next half-hour. And steel shutters roll down over all the doors and windows, preventing escape. What follows is a variation of what philosophers call the trolley problem — would you redirect an
out-of-control trolley to kill one person and save five? — except in this case there’s an evil driver at the controls.
It’s a clever conceit, but in the hands of director Greg McLean (Wolf Creek, The Darkness), it fails in its, um, execution. Too many easy jump scares, not enough psychology — an average season of Survivor features more duplicity. And the relatively small building, which should be a character in its own right — think of Die Hard, or The Raid — winds up being a bland backdrop to the action.
It’s still a decent thriller if you can stomach the gore, but you may find yourself wishing the movie had let loose with just a little more inventiveness, given the fact that the central metaphor is so bleeding obvious. Real experiments need a control; movies, not so much.