At a mysterious corporation in Colombia, eighty non-native office employees (including John Gallagher Jr., Tony Goldwyn, Adria Arjona, John C. McGinley, Sean Gunn, and Michael Rooker) are locked in and given orders to kill each other.
Written by James Gunn (of Guardians of the Galaxy fame) before he hit it big, The Belko Experiment isn’t Office Space meets Battle Royale as advertised, but is Lord of the Flies in a corporate setting and lacking in Gunn’s normal wit and humor. Perhaps that’s due to director Greg McLean who is known for bleaker fair. And that’s what we get. A one-note exercise in grimness.
The slide into violent anarchy is too quick and easy for a situation presented realistically, though since the focus is on the anarchy, it isn’t the speed that is the problem, but the realism. This would have been better as a cartoon or a dark comedy. Taken straight, and with the eventual kill-fest a forgone conclusion, the characters all become annoying—except those that just flip, like Sean Gunn (character names don’t matter) who starts empty all the water coolers to protect our precious bodily fluids.
People get nasty and start killing, but there’s no message beyond people are horrible. There’s no satire of the corporate world. People kill. People die. That’s all there is. They don’t even do that in interesting ways (or corporate-oriented ways; where is the death by stapler?). All that killing is presented well. The cast is excellent, filled with the best character actors around and the filmmaking is solid if not extraordinary, but it doesn’t matter. Professionally made nothingness isn’t all that much better than amateur nothingness. If you are thinking of hanging around so that the ending can explain it all, don’t bother. There really is no point to anything in the film.