A Deadly Experiment

James Gunn has been working as a director for some time, and as a writer for longer still, but it wasn't until the Guardians of the Galaxy movies that more people came to know his name. That recognition may have had something to do with MGM contacting him to see if he'd still be interested in making a script he'd submitted years earlier and then (for a variety of reasons) walked away from. He was. And that's how we got the twisted The Belko Experiment.

At a secretive office building in Colombia, 80 American employees show up for work one morning to find all the locals absent. Impenetrable shutters abruptly slam down to block every door and window, and an ominous voice suddenly comes over the loudspeakers: they are all now part of an experiment. If two of the workers aren't dead by the time 30 minutes have passed, there will be consequences. It seems like a cruel prank that no one takes seriously... until explosives embedded in the heads of four employees are suddenly and violently detonated. The next time the voice demands deaths, the trapped workers have no choice but to take it seriously. What follows is a warped melding of Office Space and Battle Royale, Die Hard by way of The Hunger Games.

James Gunn chose not to direct himself, handing off those duties to Greg McLean. But the script has Gunn's fingerprints all over it; this feels like a movie you'd expect from the guy who made Slither. In all the right ways, it's simple and it's gross, and filmed in as fantastically violent a manner as it needs to be for maximum impact.

Part of the fun is that this isn't cast like an action movie; it's cast like an office dramedy, with an ensemble including John Gallagher Jr. (of The Newsroom), Tony Goldwyn (of Scandal), John C. McGinley (of Scrubs), and Josh Brener (of Silicon Valley). Arguably, the only actor you'd expect to see in a movie like this is Michael Rooker, here because he's in most of James Gunn's movies, though this time not playing the tough sort of character you'd expect. As you move down through the ensemble into actors you probably won't recognize right away, there's a satisfying diversity, including Adria Arjona, Melonie Diaz, David Del Rio, James Earl, and more. And everyone is giving a solid performance, committing to this wild premise.

There's a great economy of storytelling here. The movie comes in just under an hour and a half, getting straight to its premise and not dragging things out longer than it could be sustained. That said, it also doesn't seem like the movie has much of an agenda other than horror. There could be an opportunity here to express a point of view on the true nature of people, but the movie isn't interested in being profound. Yet at least in its pursuit of visceral thrills, it's strong.

I am left a bit conflicted by the ending. This is one of those stories where the idea itself really is everything, and I suspect there aren't very many compelling ways to conclude it. I certainly don't have a better idea on how I'd have ended it. Nevertheless, there's something sort of inevitable to the conclusion that I'm not sure amounts to much.

But I think you know what you're in for when you sit down to watch a movie like this -- people are going to beat each other to death with office supplies. You get exactly what you sign up for, and horror aficionados will find it delicious most of the time. It's a solid B movie, which I mean here as a grade, not a putdown. I think most fans of the genre would enjoy it.