“The Belko Experiment” is a grisly, sick-making exercise in sadism that tries to camouflage its base venality in a thought-experiment plot. The movie opens on an unusual day at the Colombian outpost of the Belko Corporation: Heavily armed security guards and bomb-sniffing dogs monitor the gates, and send certain staff members back home.
Shortly after the workday starts, an announcement over the P.A. instructs the staff to kill two people in the next half-hour — or else more will die at the command of an unseen force who can kill with the flick of a switch. Then metal shutters and walls seal off the building, and the 80 nervous employees realize this isn’t a practical joke but rather a kill-or-be-killed game. The potheads at the bottom of the corporate ladder start screwing things up for everybody, while upper management (Tony Goldwyn, abetted by some twisted minions) takes the homicidal initiative.
Directed by Greg McLean (whose 2005 film, “Wolf Creek,” had a similar morbid interest in bullying its audience) from a script by James Gunn (currently relegated to delighting adolescents of all ages with the “Guardians of the Galaxy” franchise), the movie might have been better served by a director not hellbent on rubbing pretty much every head wound in the viewer’s face. Mr. McLean, perhaps determined to leave no cliché unturned, also wallows in the cheap and hackneyed irony of choreographed slaughter accompanied by Dvorak and Tchaikovsky.
The “Animal Farm” meets “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” climax yields some clever twists. But “The Belko Experiment” made me think that maybe it’s time to stop trying to solve the trolley problem (that is, do you sacrifice one life to save five workers from being killed by a runaway train?) and start worrying about the people who invent such conundrums.
Rated R for dozens of massive head wounds. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.
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