While the rather surprisingly robust box office performance of Top Gun: Maverick has shown, once again, that all really is back to normal on the big-screen blockbuster front, as a sort of precautionary measure, a more-stacked-than-usual summer season of streaming has also kicked off. There are shows with budgets the size of movies, from Stranger Things to Obi-Wan Kenobi to the upcoming She-Hulk and Ms Marvel, and films like The Gray Man, Prey, Secret Headquarters and Spiderhead, all slick enough to be major theatrical tentpoles. Before most of that, and on a far, far smaller scale, drops high-energy thriller Interceptor, landing with whatever the opposite of buzz is on Netflix, modelling itself as an irony-free throwback to summers past and just about succeeding.
The past in particular here would be the 80s, a time when action films were all quippy one-liners, earnest melodrama, artfully muddied up T-shirts and an uneasily fetishistic amount of guns. It’s defiantly uncool, without the wink-wink nostalgia one might expect, and on its own silly, low-stakes terms, it kind of works, easy to digest if difficult to remember. It’s led by Spanish model turned actor Elsa Pataky, who plays army captain JJ Collins, assigned to a last-minute post in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It’s an interceptor base, one of two created to prevent Russian nuclear missiles from landing on American soil. If one were to launch, there would be a short timeframe for a response (we’re told at the outset that it takes just 24 minutes for a Russian missile to land in the US, a gulp of a fact given the horrors of the last few months). In a rushed opener, we see flashes of a massacre at the other station in Alaska, meaning “the only thing standing between America and armageddon” is Collins and her team.
