In The Belko Experiment, Belko Industries has established an international foothold and encourages many of their American employees to transfer to their foreign offices. One day, the office in Bogotá, Colombia becomes heavily fortified as the employees are locked inside and informed over the intercom that two workers must die in the next thirty minutes or grave consequences will follow.
The Belko Experiment is comparable to a sick mash-up of Battle Royale and Office Space or The Hunger Games within The Office's Dunder Mifflin establishment but unfortunately lacks the satirical wit and intrigue the aforementioned inspiration brought to the table. The Belko Experiment is directed by Greg McLean and written by Guardians of the Galaxy writer-director James Gunn but neither truly deliver in execution. McLean's direction is dull and uninspired while Gunn's screenplay doesn't offer enough character expansion or take them in remotely interesting directions. Ultimately, what drew me to check out The Belko Experiment was Gunn's involvement and the idea behind it all.
The underlying concept has lots of potential but never measured up to be as twisted as I was expecting. Gunn's screenplay reasons through the situation as any normal person would by ensuring the employees consider all their alternatives before taking any course of action but the bloodbath doesn't ensue quite as I hoped. It should go without saying that The Belko Experiment is bloody bonkers but the "twists" are predictable and even the most grotesque of character demises felt conventional so the clichés undercut the film's cruel nature.
For one, the script doesn't offer enough detail on the corresponding characters for the viewer to form any attachment before the staff are butchered. When someone dies, you won't care in the slightest. Secondly, the characters don't really change over the course of the story. Everyone stands firmly in place whether they be conflicted, set for slaughter, intent on hiding out, or prone on peace. The characters don't question the immorality of their actions if they decide to kill and persuasions for peace hardly scrape the surface of some interesting idealogical conflict.
Gunn had an opportunity to lend some insightful social commentary had he gone the more satirically morbid route but instead everything's fairly straightforward. The ensemble amassed largely portray their characters as the thinly-sketched workspace stereotypes they're written out to be. John Gallagher Jr. portrays the everyman Mike, Adria Arjona's the other side of Mike's workplace romance as Leandra, Tony Goldwyn's the controlling boss, John C. McGinley's a creep, Melonie Diaz is the new girl, Sean Gunn is the conspiracy theorist, and Michael Rooker and David Dastmalchian are the mechanically inclined workmen. I could keep going but none of these characters serve a greater purpose than being pawns in a perverse turn of events and the actors portraying them don't lend anything beyond that.
When it comes down to it, I can't quite recommend The Belko Experiment unless a sickening social experiment where violence occurs for the sake of violence sounds fun to you. The Belko Experiment is unabashedly brutal, so much so that it mutilated a fascinatingly disturbing premise.
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