Video game movies have left such a poor taste in everyone’s mouth. No matter how popular the property being adapted, movies based off of video games have almost always been made with bad filmmaking, grim atmosphere, stupid writing, and boring delivery. While it’s one thing to make a bad adaptation of a video game, it’s a bit more disappointing to watch a video game movie that isn’t even based on a video game.
Kill Switch follows Will Porter (Dan Stevens), a pilot that moves to Holland to work for a private company planning a revolutionary source of energy. Not exactly green for the environment though, as the company has built a dimensional gate to a parallel universe and will siphon the energy from said universe. When something goes awry, Will is selected to jump between universes and see if the transition worked smoothly (SPOILER ALERT, it didn’t). Now in a barren alternate world, he races to find out if his sister and nephew are safe as the new world crumbles around him.
It’s a damn shame that this empty vessel is saddled onto an actor like Dan Stevens. Whether it’s as the frazzled, precocious telekinetic on FX’s Legion, the smoldering psychotic killer in The Guest, or even as the other half of the live-action Beauty and the Beast, Stevens has proven himself a capable leading man by combining natural charm with a hint of emotional scarring. He’s a grade A actor in a D- movie, completed wasted and given nothing to work with. Whoever thought it would be a good idea to put 75% of the camera in front of his face instead of on his face should be fired, flogged, rehired and then flogged again. Normally, this would require more discussion about the other actors involved in the film, but they’re so one note and entirely irrelevant that none of them are worth mentioning.
Kill Switch is essentially a cutscene from Halo that somehow stretches for 90 minutes, and you keep wanting to press the skip button to start playing. It’s unoriginal, bland, boring, and utterly devoid of inspiration. It feels like a cheap European cash grab on the possibility of interactive sci-fi that was merely slapped together instead of crafted. It’s so rare to see a movie so disinterested with itself, but maybe it’s groundbreaking in another dimension.
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