Even more so than this week’s Lightyear, a straight line runs from Top Gun: Maverick to the oddly botched Spiderhead. The film was made by Joseph Kosinski, who also directed the world’s current favourite movie; the co-star is Miles Teller, now in multiplexes as Tom Cruise’s young sidekick. The soundtrack even doubles as a 1980s jukebox. (A blast of Hall & Oates, a pinch of Thomas Dolby.)
Yet beyond that, the likeness between the films is strikingly limited. Spiderhead is a pop sci-fi Netflix curio, Teller among a batch of prisoners ensconced on a fantasy island, part of a long-term pharmaceutical study overseen by a doctor with the manner of a drive-time DJ. Just call me Steve, he insists. He is played, implausibly, by Chris Hemsworth.
The drugs being tested on Teller and friends have more elaborate names: Verbaluce for the tongue-tied, Luvactin an aphrodisiac. Others promise harsher times: Darkenfloxx and Phobica. If the choice to induce helpless laughter or gnawing terror seems arbitrary, Steve bats away protests with the fuzzy promise of a better world favoured by tech giants. Indeed, the spruce live-in lab has a touch of high-end Silicon Valley campus, the convicts a long way from jail. Or are they? Kosinski all but turns to camera and asks the question outright. (The script is adapted from a George Saunders short story.)
So much talent to get here? Hemsworth is miscast but game, Teller diligent. But the try-hard zany tone jars badly with themes of medical ethics and criminal guilt. The two sides of the film end up mutually exclusive. An ill-judged experiment itself, the movie intrigues then implodes. And then it just dissolves from memory.
★★☆☆☆
On Netflix from June 17
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