Grade: D-
Dir: Antaine Furlong
Star: Charlotte Best, Jonny Pasvolsky, Alex Menglet, Justin Cotta
a.k.a. Ascendant
What’s worse than being stuck in a lift for an hour and forty minutes. How about, watching someone else be stuck in a lift for an hour and forty minutes? For that’s what we have here, more or less. I was hoping for much better, considering the star recently impressed us in the Skinford movies. But any goodwill resulting from her performance there, evaporates like a puddle of piss in the corner of a broken elevator. All that’s left by the end of this is an unpleasant smell, and a stain on her filmography that’s going to be hard to erase. Let’s just hope her career doesn’t plummet faster than… Well, you get the picture. That’s enough Otis-related metaphors.
She plays Aria Wolf, who regains consciousness to find herself tied up in the lift of a high-tech Shanghai mega-skyscraper, with a bad case of cinematic amnesia. By which I mean, her memories return at exactly the pace and content necessary for the plot. There’s some whizzing up and down, which is memorable mostly for its woeful ignorance of physics, because an elevator in free-fall would not pin an occupant against the ceiling. It would need to be consistently being driven down, accelerating faster than gravity, for that to happen. Eventually, things settle down, in a welter of confusing flashbacks, where we see the young Aria and her sister Zara, possessing nature-related superpowers and the ability to see into the future.
The video screen which forms one wall of the elevator lights up and there’s Russian thug Yaroslav (Menglet), who is holding Aria’s dad (Pasvolsky) hostage, and torturing him in order to get her to reveal the location of “the Engineer.” Which is a bit awkward since Aria has no clue who that is. Fortunately, her phone – which, similarly to her memory, works or doesn’t in the precise way demanded by the script – connects her to an old friend of her father’s, Jack, who is able to begin a search, to try and locate Aria and rescue her. Will he get there in time? Who is the mysterious Engineer? And will the audience ever give a damn about any of these questions?
Ooh, I know the answer to the last one: no. Mostly because Furlong is clearly more interested in creating a franchise, loosely ripped off from X-Men: First Class, rather than telling a stand-alone story. This means we get copious set-up, courtesy of those flashbacks, as if Furlong realized shutting his heroine in a lift for 90 minutes isn’t going to work. He then offers no real ending to speak of, so you have very little here capable of sustaining interest. This should have been a 45-minute pilot episode, not a feature film, and might have struggled even at that length. The eco-lecturing ladled on top, in lines like “Humans are disgusting. Can’t you see that? They’re cruel. They pollute. They destroy” doesn’t help. I’ll take the stairs, thank you very much.