Director: Federico D'Alessandro
Year Released: 2018
Rating: 0.5
Thief Julia (Maika Monroe) is kidnapped by computer scientist Alex (Ed Skrein) - who is full of nerd rage and not good at talking to girls - to be a test subject for a project he's working on involving artificial intelligence (details are apparently not necessary), and she's kept in place by his home's chatty security system named "Tau" (voiced by Gary Oldman) that she tries to befriend (!?). Like so many other newer films of late, this is missing a first act - you know, when you introduce and develop your principal characters and set the tone, etc. - so it gets right into the monotony of Julia trying to escape and Alex, along with Tau, dragging her back ... that is, until it gets to its "philosophical parts" (sarcastic quotation marks necessary) when you might want to hit the "Mute" and make sure Closed Captioning is disabled. Cobbles bits from other action/horror movies - the sentinel Aries is ED-209 from RoboCop, Tau is HAL 9000 and the mini drones are like the Spheres from the Phantasm series - and D'Alessandro abuses the red and blue filters ... but hey! Gary Oldman's voice is in it! Isn't that something?
