Not content to spend 2022 simply resurrecting Pete “Maverick” Mitchell and stuffing him back behind the joysticks of ludicrously fast planes in his glorious Top Gun sequel, Joseph Kosinski was also taking potshots at big pharma courtesy of Spiderhead; a Netflix thriller that tries hard to avoid the streaming premier curse of being instantly forgettable. A gradual, unravelling mystery that sees Chris Hemsworth watching over Miles Teller and Jurnee Smollett as they undergo some really questionable drug trials, it’s a flashy, paranoia thriller that possibly could have come from the likes of Tony Scott back in the day – although, there’s more than a few similarities to Michael Bay’s The Island now that I think about it.
Anyway, seperated from the breakneck speed of Top Gun: Maverick, or denied the lush, sci-fi visuals of Tron: Legacy and Oblivion, can Kosinski manage to stimulate our various pleasure centres with this slick thriller?
The rather sinisterly titled Spiderhead is actually a state of the art penitentiary who has shifted the status of some prisoners of the state into willing test subjects for the experimentation of the effects of various, mood altering, test chemicals. The project is being overseen by the noticeably cheerful Steve Abnesti and while the “prisoners” are all free to roam and intermingle with one another, the drugs they are all here to test are delivered by a device called a MobiPak that attached constantly to the small of their back.
It seems that Steve has a whole bunch of various, colourfully-named concoctions to pump them with, such as the hysteria inducing “Lafodill”, the vocabulary expanding “Verbaluce” and the severe emotional depressant known as “Darkenfloxx”. However, the new one he’s really trying out is “Luvactin”, a compound that whips up amorous feelings in no time flat.
One of the recipients of these various, injected, experiences is Jeff, who is still emotionally wounded from causing the death of a friend in a car crash while he was inebriated. But while a lot of the other prisoners are worth steering clear from, he finds himself drawn to fellow inmate Lizzy, while both are carefully vague about the circumstances that have brought them here. However, after various Luvactin trials that sees Jeff have sex with various other women in the prison, he soon starts to get the feeling that some of these experiments as verging on the sinister. In fact, when Steve starts insisting that the “higher-ups” are demanding more experiments using the fairly dangerous Darkenfloxx, it seems like disaster is bound to happen.
But is despite his perky demeanor, is Steve actually telling the truth? What is the overall point of Spiderhead? And what is so special about the compound known as B-6 that Steve is so desperate to get right?
Big Pharma? Try big harmer.
If there’s an overriding issue with Spiderhead, it’s that Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror has done such a good job satirising most of the shadier aspects of human life, that any conspiracy thriller that jabs at the flanks of anything invented by a soulless corporate mandate to fuck with our very essence simply feels like a feature length rip-off. Sure, we have the presence of Chris Hemsworth and Miles Teller in front of the camera, and Kosinski’s cinematic eye requires a budget more than Netflix could shell out for a single episode, but inevitable problems tend to arise when Brooker’s show could pull off the same feat in literally half the time. As a result, there’s a feeling that Spiderhead, at an admittedly reasonable 107 minutes, still kind feels a tad overwritten as it goes through the whole conspiracy thing.
The thing is, you kind of already know it’s all a big conspiracy thanks to some eccentric fonts used for the opening credits and an impressively unsubtle performance by Chris Hemsworth; which is sort of a problem because isn’t the point of a conspiracy thriller for us to actually be shocked by the revelation that there’s actually a conspiracy at all? Maybe Kosinski just wants to cut out the middle man and start making us uneasy right from the get-go, but the result ends up being a tad predictable as you can figure our where Spiderhead is going long before the characters on screen do. Still, while real surprises are thin on the ground, the cast is talented enough, and Kosinski creates enough fucked-up scenarios to keep things chugging along nicely. After all, imagine yourself in the shoes of Miles Teller, locked in a room with the gargantuan man-mountain known as Nathan (Mad Max: Fury Road) Jones and were told that Luvactin trials were about to begin…
It’s that twisted sense of humour that keeps Spiderhead flowing through the veins and it’s mostly embodied by the fact that Hemsworth utterly refuses to deliver a single line reading without either being epically smug, stunningly glib, or simply just taking the piss – and while Steve Abnesti is hardly a classically intimidating antagonist, he’s certainly hissable in a big-budget, pantomime sort of way. Whether getting high on his own supply, or delivering an endless fusillcade of whithering put-downs to his hapless assistant, Mark, you can tell the actor is having fun flexing those overdeveloped, humor-muscles of his. Having noticably far less fun is Teller, who is required to play tormented while being picked to be Abnesti’s star pupil. However, he doesn’t have to do the broody, heavy lifting on his own as he forges a nice coupling with Lovecraft Country’s Smollett – when he’s isn’t being compelled to screw gaunt meth-heads in the name of science.
However, while it’s mostly diverting stuff, the various big messages aren’t really that profound. A well-groomed, wealthy man with a God complex, who screwing with people’s lives to further his own goals is hardly a ground breaking villain, mainly because the last twenty years or so alone have given us plenty of real-life examples to draw from. As it stands, the lush, clean, distinctive visuals that Kosinski has become known for certainly gives Spiderhead a watchable sheen, and the cast manage to install the necessary gravitas to keep the shakier aspects of the script stable, but mostly this film ends up like Hemsworth’s slippery sadist – looks nice, talks a good game, but once you peer under the surface, it proves to be as deep as a puddle.
A nicely diverting thriller can’t quite deliver an injection of relevance to get past the rather basic message of rich bad people are bad and rich. I had fun while watching it, but no amount of Luvactin would make you embrace Spiderhead other than a random time waster.
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