When a batch of stolen mobile Russian nukes are aimed at America, it falls to one anti-missile interceptor station in the Pacific to stop them.
The only problem is the same group who have stolen the missiles have infiltrated the station and are trying to break their way into the control centre.
It falls to disgraced* officer JJ Collins (Elsa Pataky) to stop them from getting inside.
Before I get into the review, if you want to watch Interceptor, trigger warning for inferences of sexual assault.
I first read Matthew Reilly in the early noughties - I remember buying his book Ice Station at an airport bookstore before a flight.
I motored through that book and everything else he wrote for a year or two.
Reilly has a gift for crafting fast-paced action thrillers that felt like action movies.
They are great holiday reads.
I have not read a Reilly book in years but when I heard he had finally made an action movie I was curious to see it.
Interceptor is like a Matthew Reilly book brought to the screen - there is almost no fat and the focus is on sheer momentum.
Most of the action takes place in a control room but Reilly and co-writer Stuart Beattie (Collateral) ensure that it never gets bogged down.
After Top Gun: Maverick, Interceptor is another callback to the action movies of an earlier age, when the threats were nuclear rather than cosmic.
In the lead role, Elsa Pataky is great and takes the whole thing completely seriously.
Having a lead whose first language is not English also reinforces the films’ links with action movies past.
After her unceremonious exit from the Fast and Furious saga, it is good to see her in a role where she gets to take an active role in the action.
The character has a solid backstory and motive which is called back at pivotal moments - it is all familiar action scripting 101 but it works.
And like all action heroes she spends most of the movie in a white wifeeater.
*Despite this being an escapist thriller, her backstory is surprisingly adult for what I was expecting.
Collins has been sent to the station because she brought down a top brass who tried to assault her. The movie is very delicate and clear-eyed with this piece of the story but it grounds the character in a way that reflects a sadly common experience for women in the military.
Interceptor had a small budget but the movie is so well-paced it never feels constrained.
The largely Australian cast are solid, with Luke Bracey as the film’s primary antagonist.
And as an action helmer, Reilly knows what he is doing.
The fight sequences are well-choreographed, and he makes sure to cover them in extended wide shots. There is always a clear sense of geography and while there are a few beats of super-physicality, the filmmakers make sure that Pataky never feels like she has a clear path to victory. Every fight is a scrappy, semi-improvised scramble to outwit her bigger opponents.
A great little potboiler, Interceptor would make a great double bill with that other wifeeater-in-an-enclosed-space epic Cop Shop.
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