There’s a lot of gore but not much in the way of the satire promised by the premise, which sounds like
Saw meets
Office Space: 80 employees are locked into a Belko (“Business Without Boundaries”) building one morning, and informed via the intercom they need to start killing one another. And that’s pretty much it: This is a one-note scenario that never ups the ante on itself, and never bothers to use its extreme situation to send up office politics or corporate policies. We never know what any of these workers are to one another, beyond the putative hero, Mike (John Gallagher Jr.), the one guy who doesn’t instantly leap to murder, and his romantic relationship with Leandra (Adria Arjona), and even that is woefully underdeveloped. We never get any sense of office hierarchy prior to the moment when COO Barry (Tony Goldwyn) decides it's up to him to choose who lives and who dies. Written by
Guardians of the Galaxy’s James Gunn and directed by Greg McLean of
Wolf Creek fame, this is as empty an exercise as any workplace team-building nonsense, without even seeming to realize it.
By
MaryAnn Johanson