You would not believe how long I had to wait before I was finally able to see this movie. I first heard about it all the way back in Christmas 2016, but had to wait until around April 2017 before it even got a UK release, Then, after having posters all over the lobby and even showing trailers for it, my local cinema was told at the last minute that they were not among the special chosen few of their chain to get to show the film (and it's crap like this, not prices, that's going to be the cause of people abandoning their cinemas in favour of home streaming), and the nearest cinema to me that was showing it was 50 miles away. So I had to wait until I could obtain a copy to watch at home before I was finally able to see The Belko Experiment, so it had better be bloody worth it.
Belko Industries is a company with offices all around the world, including Bogota, Columbia, which is where the film is set. As various Belko employees arrive at work, they notice a heavy military presence at the office building and that all the local employees are being sent home early, but they think little of it. Abruptly, a voice comes over the intercom and tells them that the remaining 80 employees will be taking part in an experiment and that the first stage of it will be to kill three of their number in the next 30 minutes or six of them will die at random. This will be further enforced by the implants in each employee's skull, which they had been told was just a GPS tracker to guard against kidnapping but turn out to be miniature bombs. As the stakes and the body count start to side, workplace grudges come to the surface quickly, colleagues turn on one another and people form groups based on what they find themselves willing to do to survive...
"Office Space meets Battle Royale!" screams the poster for The Belko Experiment, and as previous reviews have shown, I tend to take statements like that as a challenge. And certainly, there's some very obvious nods to Battle Royale in the film - most obviously the "kill each other till only one of you is left standing" plot; the mini-bombs in the skulls; even the trailer featured Verdi's Requiem prominently (although very sneakily it wasn't in the actual film). But it is not Battle Royale - but that's okay, because it's not claiming to be (that above quote was from a review). The Belko Experiment manages to be its own film.
Leaving aside the obvious difference of all the characters being adult office workers rather than Japanese schoolchildren, one main difference is that the power dynamics are completely different. Here we have an entire office building's worth of staff; from COO to maintenance; new girl to canteen staff; and all of them of course react differently to the situation. The film does show its hand a little early with some characters, however; it's so easy to believe that there's at least one office worker who would have shot up the office eventually if this hadn't happened first that you're almost impatient for him to appear... but then there's also a throwaway line before everything really kicks off about how the COO is ex-Special Forces and it just makes you sigh and wait for him to become a nigh-unstoppable killing machine by the third act.
The Belko Experiment comes from the pen on James Gunn (you might know him from a couple of films called Guardians of the Galaxy Vols. 1 and 2, among others) and was directed by Greg McLean of Wolf Creek infamy. So it clearly has a pretty impressive pedigree. It also has several well-known names in the cast as well - there's Michael Rooker as a maintenance man (and not "blue Merle" as I've taken to calling him), and Dr. Cox from Scrubs is worryingly believeable as inevitable office shooter Wendell. In fact, the characterisation and humanity of the hapless Belko employees is one of the high spots of the film. From the stoner cafeteria worker to the security guard trying to just do his job in the face of all this; the terrified secretary to the executive who just wants to make it home to his kids. Even once the killing starts en masse, you can still feel sympathy for most of the characters (except Wendell. He's a creep).
Music is also used to great effect in The Belko Experiment. While Verdi's Requiem was just cruelly dangled in front of us in the trailer to lure us in, there's still an iconic song played over a particularly harrowing scene. In this case it's a Latin American cover of California Dreamin' and it really is used brilliantly.
However... (813 words. Not bad.) The Belko Experiment still can't help but be compared to other films like Battle Royale, and parts of it still fall into those traditional tropes we see in films like this. Some character tropes I've already mentioned above, but once again I found most of the plot twists to be wholly predictable, and the protagonist of course is one of those characters who starts off just wanting everyone to get along and goes to just about every extreme possible to avoid being violent to anyone, so you just know he's going to end up beating someone's brains out with his bare hands, or something similar, by the end of the film. Even with all its original changes, The Belko Experiment is still somewhat derivative, not to mention not as good as the film it's inevitably compared with. It's fun enough, but it's not going to dethrone the reigning champion any time soon.
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