This violent Netflix thriller proves that Noomi Rapace is a bonafide action star, but she’s in desperate need of stronger material.
Vicky Jewson’s “Close” transparently aspires to be something of a female riff on Jason Bourne. However, shot in only 29 days — and with a fraction of the budget for an average Hollywood blockbuster — it feels more like a proof-of-concept for an idea that the film industry has already proven (e.g. “Salt,” Tomb Raider,” “Haywire,” etc), and a dull reminder that studios need to invest more of their resources into it. Whatever inherent value there might be in gender-flipping such a generic template is mitigated by the movie’s reluctance to seize on the unique energy that its women bring to the table.
The film doesn’t have to justify casting a lead who isn’t named Chris or Matt, but Jewson and co-writer Rupert Whitaker (whose previous collaborations include 2014’s similarly violent “Born of War”) may have been too rushed to take advantage of it. If nothing else, this cut-rate thriller should be enough to silence anyone who still doubts that Noomi Rapace deserves her own bonafide action franchise, as the film revels in the strong-jawed Swede’s rare ability to alchemize Lisbeth Salander’s hardness with Jason Statham’s appetite for destruction. If only the character she plays were even half as exciting as how she plays it.
Rapace plays Sam, who was supposedly inspired by “the world’s leading female bodyguard,” Jacquie Davis. While Davis has been hired to protect luminaries such as J.K. Rowling and Diana Ross, “Close” assigns Sam to babysit the exact archetype you might expect: A spoiled teenage heiress who’s way more interested in clubbing than she is in looking after her late dad’s phosphate mines. Her name is Zoe (cherubic Canadian actress Sophie Nélisse, who fights valiantly against her vapid role), and she got along a bit too well with her last bodyguard: Sam is only hired because her agent is asked to “find someone who Zoe can’t fuck.” It’s also quite clear that Sam is someone who Zoe can’t fuck with, as a tense and bloody prologue — a desert shootout against some nondescript insurgents — displays Jewson’s talent for staging lucid, visceral action scenes on even the most limited of scales.