Spiderhead (2022)

Directed by Joseph Kosinski. Starring Miles Teller, Chris Hemsworth, Mark Paguio, Jurnee Smollett, Tess Haubrich, Stephen Tongun, Angie Milliken, BeBe Bettencourt. [R]

Hemsworth’s creepy, unbalanced performance as a prison superintendent enriches this futuristic tale, but can’t save it from its confused tone, repetitiveness, and general inanity. Prisoners on an island facility that resembles a supervillain’s compound reduce their sentences by volunteering for drug experiments, but one of the subjects (Teller) starts to question what’s really going on here. Based on a George Saunders short story (“Escape from Spiderhead”) published in The New Yorker, the padding is as unmistakable as the adherence to predictable story beats and mind-control tropes. There’s a genuine romance that develops (or is it being orchestrated?) between Teller and fellow prisoner/subject Smollett, but there’s so little urgency and feeling behind it that their fates are inconsequential. Some of the dark humor is, no doubt, intentional, as is the sly inclusion of so much 70s/80s yacht rock on the soundtrack, but there are embarrassed laughs here as well, such as the bankrupt names of the drugs (e.g., Verbaluce makes you talkative, Phobica makes you terrified, etc.), the way a Bingo card figures into the dramatic reveal, and the off-the-wall storytelling surrender of a climax that belongs in a different movie. Hemsworth also co-produced.

40/100