K-SCORE: 59
Director: Greg McLean
Writer: James Gunn
Starring: John Gallagher Jr., Tony Goldwyn, Adria Arjona, John C. McGinley, Melonie Diaz, Josh Brener, Michael Rooker
Spoiler Level: Moderate
The Belko Experiment, a film about a group of American office workers who get trapped inside their building and are forced to kill each other by an anonymous sadist whose voice rings over a loudspeaker, falls into all too common pitfalls.
Like so many other stories out there, it detonates the bombs that have been surgically implanted in the characters’ skulls too rapidly and too often. It’s always better to spread your subdermal cranial explosions that splatter brains onto cubicle walls over a long period of time. And there’s no need to murder 75% of your cast with that trick, which speaks to another problem that I just keep seeing. There needs to be more people shredded with the blade off of a dismantled paper cutter. While I’m at it, if you’re going to include a Hispanic secretary that hides in elevator shafts after murdering maintenance workers who lost their cool at the first signs of a maniacal experiment, as so many films do, you’ve got to make sure that she plays an integral role in the final kills of the tie-wearing executives. How many times do I have to see the blow torch that failed to free the group of entrapped employees from their metal-walled confines NOT be wielded as a weapon in the subsequent battle? Why do these films always have a cage full of guns ready to be stolen and used for kills instead of any number of perfectly deadly office supplies? Not a single paperclip, three hole punch, or sticky note was used to snuff out the existence of one of these nine-to-fivers. And if your film is in this huge genre, of films about trapped and tortured bureaucrats who don’t know what their companies actually do, make sure the script applauds the creativity of these characters when they think to escape, reduce the degree to which their being surveiled, or try to perform some self-surgery. It’s like every time they just get threats that their cerebellums are going to be superheated and turned into a fleshy, mushy, bloody paste, and so they’re like, “oh okay, I’ll stop.” Typical.
“ultimately, it’s unsatisfying to see a sample size of one”
The Belko Experiment gives away in its title that the whole forced murder concept is a… well… experiment. Experiments, by their nature, have to be repeated in order to yield data. The twist speaks to this concept, thankfully, so it’s not like the creators don’t know about this. But, ultimately, it’s unsatisfying to see a sample size of one. Someone, someday, is going to see the benefit of repeating this concept or one similar over and over, but with different casts, and it's going to make a fantastic miniseries. Until then, we have to accept the idea that people who pitch this kind of thing to producers use “low budget” as a selling point. Until then, we have to settle for this. And though this isn’t horrible, they’re not in a giant, trap-filled, always-shifting cube, so… MEDIOCRE!