No payday for bloody office
THE BELKO EXPERIMENT
BORED cubicle workers at an anodyne human resources company in Colombia at first think it’s a prank when the windows are sealed off and a voice comes on the intercom to tell them that, if two of them don’t get murdered, there will be consequences. Then people’s heads start to explode.
“The Belko Experiment,” a film written by James Gunn (“Guardians of the Galaxy”) and named after the company where the workers turn savage, could have been sociologically meaningful or even satirically amusing. Instead, it’s just a bloodbath — although “bath” seems inadequate to describe the quantity of gore on offer. Blood ocean, maybe, or blood volcano.
After the violence begins, the boss (Tony Goldwyn) declares that orders from the mysterious intercom voice should be taken seriously, which is tough, because the next order is that 30 people must get murdered within two hours, or 60 people will be killed by whoever is terrorizing the office. He and his skeevy henchman (John C. McGinley) wonder if they should break into the company armory and start shooting co-workers, while a faction led by the kindhearted Mike (John Gallagher Jr.) and his girlfriend (Adria Arjona) insist there must be a better option, although they never find one.
That’s one big problem here: The good guys don’t actually have a solution. As things turn chaotic, the movie attempts to be a parable about what happens when a tiny group gets broken off from civility a la “Lord of the Flies” — call it “Lord of the Staplers” — but there winds up being little in the way of meaning to anything, and the end arrives without an explanation or a twist to put everything in focus. For all its promise of being a wry commentary on the savagery of office politics, “The Belko Experiment” is more like an experiment in how many cracked-open skulls can be crammed into one movie.