Streaming on Netflix

Inmates at a special penal unit can reduce their sentence in exchange for testing mood altering pharmaceuticals.

‘Okay, so there’s this secret penal unit where the inmates are made to take mood altering pharmaceuticals…!’

I have to say that if this were pitched to me, I would be scratching my head after the first sentence. ‘And this is different from your average drug-riddled prison exactly how?’

There may well be something interesting going on somewhere deep inside the premise of Spiderhead, but I couldn’t get past this fundamental stumbling block. Indeed, in or out of prisons, there doesn’t seem to be a shortage of people willing to ingest any substance to see how it will rewire their brain.

The pedigree of this movie is perfectly fine. I loved Top Gun Maverick which director Joseph Kosinski recently helmed. Writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick have some decent credits between them – Zombieland and Deadpool are both much enjoyed movies. Miles Teller is a perfectly sound screen actor. Chris Hemsworth might be over-reaching himself here, but then again, his role as a sort of mad, coked-up pharmaceutical boss is terribly baggy and over-written.

But aside from a limp reveal in the final act, it’s pretty hard to work out what the story is supposed to be. There’s a lot of talking very quickly and some occasional shouting, but for three-quarters of the movie I really had no idea who was trying to do what and why. And when we get to the reveal, such as it is, I couldn’t help thinking: ‘We need a drug to do that?’

As for the bizarre comedy coda… it was as if the movie had thrown up its hands in surrender. Either that, or the creatives had wired themselves up to one of Chris Hemsworth’s sci-fi drug infusers and set it to ‘random’.

Verdict: Spiderhead is slow, over-written and fundamentally misconceived. 4/10

Martin Jameson