Failures of ‘The Gorge’ go deep

 Billed as an action/romance, The Gorge is set to bow on Apple TV+. I’ve been hesitant about reviewing movies released exclusively on streaming services. My reluctance doesn’t necessarily speak to the quality of such films, but a lingering prejudice about the superiority of theatrical releases has proven difficult to shake, at least for me.

  I nonetheless opted to watch The Gorge. Given the chaos of the moment, I craved a diversion that might contain vertiginous thrills — no matter how obviously delivered. 

   Here’s the premise. Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy play two sharpshooters — one a former Marine, the other a servant of Russian overlords—who are assigned to remote posts in what appears to be an Eastern European wilderness. They are separated by a deep gorge that's home to an ominous threat. 

   Their job: Prevent the threat — dubbed The Hollow Men — from climbing out of the gorge, a task that requires ample amounts of ammunition.

   Don't get too excited. Sure, T.S. Eliot wrote a poem called The Hollow Men and the screenplay includes other erudite references but they play more like Post-it notes than deeply felt revelations.

    A simple story arc emerges. Independent sorts, the sharpshooters must bridge the physical gap that keeps them apart, join forces in a battle for survival, and, of course, fall in love.

   At first, I remained hopeful. Sigourney Weaver turns up as a no-nonsense official who sends Teller’s Levi on his mission. Of course, we don’t trust her; she’s too crisp, too smart to be straightforward. 

   After providing some background about Taylor-Joy’s character, director Scott Derrickson lands the two assassins at their outposts, towers flanking both sides of the wide gorge. They’ve been instructed  to communicate with each other, but Taylor-Joy’s Drassa makes signs for Teller's Levi to read through his high-powered binoculars. She invites him to help her celebrate her birthday.

    Derrickson doesn’t waste time revealing the danger,  mutant creatures that look as though they’ve been assembled from sticks, leaves, slime, and animal parts. 

     Joy-Taylor's boldness gives the movie one of its few highlights carrying us to the moment when the two killers wind up in the gorge. There, Derrickson and his team build a world shrouded in fog and populated by weird creatures.

   Considering that both characters are deadly shots at long distances, it's odd that the movie forces them into so much close-quarters combat, slathering the action with gook and gore.

    When our heroes find an abandoned laboratory, we learn how the creatures were spawned, another letdown. A film made by a long-gone scientist explains the whole movie, but not without a heavy reliance on devices that the scientist and her colleagues conveniently left behind.

   You'll have little trouble finding your own examples of contrivance, so I'll conclude by saying that The Gorge returned me unrewarded to the world I'd been trying to escape.