It’s almost impossible sitting down to watch the loopy sci-fi thriller 65 without being niggled by a familiar sinking feeling, like you’re about to eat a meal that you know won’t agree with your system. Despite the intriguing presence of Adam Driver, whose post-Star Wars roles have typically prioritised art over commerce, and a magnetically gonzo premise that sees a pilot crash-land on prehistoric Earth, it’s arriving weighed down by baggage heavy enough to flatten any hopes the thrillingly nutty trailer might have inspired.
Not only has the film, shot two years ago, already missed five prior release dates but it’s landing last minute without much of a visible campaign (it was only officially scheduled last month) and almost entirely without screenings for critics (I attended the only one in New York, taking place just hours before release). Inevitably, this then lowers even the most optimistic of optimist’s expectations to beneath ground level, a cursed backstory for something seemingly so awful that studio Sony would rather bury it than have anyone actually watch it. But as is often the case with such a lead-in, it’s more ho-hum than horrible, a mess but not a hugely embarrassing one.
Perhaps if it had been truly tell-everyone-on-Twitter terrible, then maybe it would at least be remembered by the time it swiftly lands on plane movie rotation but 65 veers between fine and slightly less than, never quite bringing the fun we were expecting,
Unusually, for an elevator pitch genre film such as this, it starts off in far shakier territory than where it ends up. Driver’s pilot, Mills, is saying goodbye to his wife and sick daughter (cue performed light cough) before he goes on a two-year mission. Shot during early Covid, we rush through the scene-setting to avoid anything that might prove logistically difficult for what’s essentially a two-hander, an understandable sacrifice given the time, but the frantic pace continues once he crash-lands on a mysterious planet, clumsily sprinting us through what should have been a more delicately effective buildup. The first act has the feeling of something that caused sleepless nights in the edit suite, jankily jumbled together, short and choppy scenes ending before they should, giving it a distractingly arrhythmic quality (criminally, the discovery that the planet contains dinosaurs (!) is truly fumbled). Once Mills finds a fellow survivor (an excellent, understated Ariana Greenblatt), the pair must make their way across dangerous terrain to an escape pod.
It’s a pretty unremarkable survival movie from then on, but efficiently so in the shortest of bursts, thanks to a physically committed Driver taking it all rather seriously and some moments of decent enough jeopardy. We’re teased something gnarlier, something that might have distanced it even further from the family-friendly Jurassic Park franchise other than quality and budget, but it’s all a little too restrained to be the extreme and extremely silly B-movie it could and should have been. One tellingly funny scene has Greenblatt’s cute kid rescue a friendly dinosaur before it gets promptly ripped apart by others but that’s as knowingly nasty as it gets – we’re otherwise stuck with a makeshift family melodrama squeezed in between some mostly unscary scare sequences. Rather than build up genuine suspense, as writers Scott Beck and Bryan Woods did in their breakout script for A Quiet Place, as writer-directors here they rely on an annoying overdose of jump scares, most of which cause yawns rather than jolts. In the slightly more involving final act, Beck and Woods lean further into the goofiness of their premise, as danger starts quite literally falling out of the sky, but it’s a case of too little, too late.
It’s not quite the toxic disaster it’s being treated as but 65 is nowhere near the giddy lark it should have been, crash-landing somewhere in the middle instead.
65 is out in UK and US cinemas on 10 March
