Black Ops

The convergence of movies and video games takes a giant leap forward with Black Ops. A somewhat clever variation on the endless time loop trope of Groundhog Day and Edge of Tomorrow, the film combines—fairly seamlessly—The Twilight Zone-like science fiction, supernatural horror, and gruesome action with a surprisingly persuasive moral element about cleaning up one's karmic mess after misdeeds. Much more graceless is the film's obvious, single-shooter game look (including frequent over-a-rifle-barrel subjective camera angles) and feel (especially its cyclical, attack/fail/try again structure). All that's missing for a viewer is an Xbox controller. Writer-director Tom Paton sets the bloodsoaked story in two nightmarish environments. The first is in the rural wild of some unidentified, most likely Eastern European nation undergoing a brutal civil war. While civilians are being rounded up, tortured and murdered by a militia, a third party of outsiders called "Hell's Bastards"—possibly mercenaries, certainly one or another kind of off-the-radar, international force—has dropped into the middle of the horror, guns blazing, to steal some kind of intel. In an early sequence's most chilling moment, one of the team's more humane members, Kia (Samantha Schnitzler), is forced by her cruel commander, Will (Shayne Ward), to execute an innocent young woman. The second environment, which sounds a little laughable on paper, is a claustrophobia-inducing stairwell where Will, Kia, and their colleagues find themselves endlessly climbing. Why this is happening is never explained. But two things are certain: heading back downstairs means being shredded by that dead young woman's phantom, while going forward means stepping through a time portal that forces the team to relive the earlier battle, including the atrocity they committed. Each time they try to alter the past in order to escape it, something goes wrong and they end up back on the stairs. Figuring out what they have to change about their actions during the earlier carnage is the only answer. But what, and how? Paton ratchets up tensions between characters while doing a fine job of visually refreshing those recurring moments on that battlefield. Schnitzler, Ward, and a few other cast members bring a memorable grit to the proceedings, which gives Black Ops enough emotional and dramatic heft to balance out all the stairwell-from-hell absurdity. Bargain basement effects (deep blue filters, cheesy explosions) get an A for effort, as does some scary-looking fight choreography (don't get in a knife skirmish with these guys). If Paton can lose the video game trappings in his future work, he shows a lot of promise. Lightly recommended. (T. Keogh)