110 min | R | January 25, 2024 | Lionsgate
Russell Crowe flies a drone. Liam Hemsworth runs through a jungle. A straightforward military thriller that works because it commits to being exactly that.
A Delta Force team drops into the Philippines to extract a CIA asset. The mission goes wrong immediately. The team gets ambushed. The rookie survives. His only lifeline is a drone pilot sitting in an air-conditioned room in Las Vegas watching through a camera. The film splits between the man on the ground fighting to survive and the man in the chair trying to keep him alive. The structure is simple and effective.
Liam Hemsworth plays Kinney, the green operator stuck in hostile territory, with enough physicality and desperation to sell the danger. He is not his brother but he does not need to be. Russell Crowe plays Reaper, the drone pilot, with the casual competence of a man who has done this job long enough to know when things are truly bad. Crowe brings weight to a role that could have been a man staring at monitors. Luke Hemsworth and Ricky Whittle round out the Delta team with professional efficiency.
William Eubank directs with a clear understanding of action geography. You always know where people are and what they are running toward or away from. The drone footage sequences are well-integrated. The jungle action is staged with enough grit to feel consequential. The script does not try to be political or make grand statements about modern warfare. It uses the drone-versus-ground dynamic as a storytelling mechanism and sticks with it.
This is a mid-budget action movie that knows what it is and delivers it cleanly. The tension holds. The action escalates logically. The relationship between the man on the ground and the man in the sky earns its emotional payoff. January is a dumping ground for studios. This one does not deserve to be dumped.