Black Ops (Movie Review)

Last Updated on December 21, 2021

PLOT: After a Black Ops team completes a vague mission in a nondescript European country, they become trapped in a haunted stairwell on a continuous-time loop. I wanted something in the vein of BUTTERFLY EFFECT, but all I got was the horror equivalent of 12 DAYS OF CHRISTMAS. Help me, please.

LOWDOWN: Getting a movie made is an impressive feat, no matter how you cut it, regardless of the outcome. Because of this, I’d like to give credit to BLACK OPS (WATCH IT HERE)  for attempting something grand with little, if anything, to make it a reality. Go big or go home, right? So I will tip my hat to the dedication presented here and applaud its scope. Now, As far pleasantries go, that’s the best I can do for what I can only describe as a late afternoon Syfy channel affair. This might get rough, so do as Arnold requested in JURASSIC PARK and “hold on to your butts.” Starting off on a stealth mission turned shootout, our special ops squad kills a hostage because of… orders? Lets a few other innocents die at the hands of the enemy before cleaning house and giving a few fist bumps for a job well done. This flagrant disregard for human life ends up being the wrong choice (who knew?) and is the cause for their purgatory-esque stairwell adventure.

I can usually get down with time loop horror and consider TRIANGLE and TIME CRIMES required reading material, but BLACK OPS (also known as The Ascent) is in a league of its own. Equal parts horror, action, and sci-fi, this is both utterly cluttered yet hollow and surface level. The idea to mix genres can be a refreshing way to tackle a well-worn story thread (think MATRIX blending kung-fu and sci-fi), but in the end, your foundation NEEDS to favor one over the other. I have watched this movie twice, and still don’t know what it wants to be.

Action can be a tough thing to nail down on a smaller budget. It’s not impossible but requires a lot of focus and effort to become believable and engaging. There is a skill set needed to get it right, and HOLY SHIT does this movie not have it. The action scenes are so cheap here that they forget to color grade the muzzle flashes. I kid you not; every gun fired has a distracting orange asset plastered on top. In what should be an intense opening scene transforms into a bunch of friends cosplaying as military personnel over an awkward day for night effect. When there was a bullet traveling through the body of an enemy, we were treated to some low-grade CGI blood splatter from the early 2000s. Instead of showing how ruthless and tough the squad actually is, this unintentionally gives a laughable action sequence that would fit in nicely next to ICE SHARKS. The effects are so amateurish that you’d assume they were done the night before. Nothing about this opening works and deflates any confidence you might have had going in. *Sigh*

There are nine characters in this bloated story. If we were watching a slasher or a monster flick, then I’d say ‘The more, the merrier’ but in a story whose synopsis states “…To survive, they must revisit their past sins if they ever want to get out,” BLACK OPS is meant to be more thoughtful and emotional. The problem is that we have too many characters. We can’t have any sort of meaningful resolution/development with an ensemble cast in a ninety-minute movie. Once everyone becomes trapped in the never-ending stairwell, they get picked off by the ghost. This could have been a phycological mind f*ck, but everyone either immediately goes crazy, accepts death, or denies everything outright. There isn’t one emotional beat earned or even makes logical sense, and by the end, our remaining few act more annoyed than anything. It almost seems like the ghost (maybe a demon?) is just sort of…there. It’s hard to sell the horror when it’s more of a nuisance for the characters.

Moreover, they aren’t presented like actual human beings. Everyone’s integrated with stock military traits that were cliched in the ’90s. I get it, everybody is tough and screams a lot: way to go on breaking new ground. On the acting front, no one stands above the rest. Our protagonist Kia (Schnitzler), does well enough but didn’t have the depth to sell her struggle, and she was the closest thing we had to a relatable character. Whatever the failings of the actors are, the script doesn’t do anyone any favors. Some of the dialogue could have been pulled staright from the original RESIDENT EVIL game, and you’d be none the wiser. Between odd reactions to serious events or the lack of actual character progression, it seems like they wrote the script as a YouTube short that needed to be extended into a feature-length movie ASAP.

GORE: We get some poorly rendered CGI blood and a couple of stabbings. Not that better gore would have helped, but it might have made it ironically enjoyable? I’m grasping at straws here folks.

BOTTOM LINE: BLACK OPS started off on the wrong foot and never got the chance to recover. Storywise it was ok, but it’s nothing that we haven’t see done better before (TRIANGLE). If your story is sub-par, then you need to either bring on better actors or hype up the gore: here we got neither. Between the wooden acting, generic script, and shoehorned in horror, this was the holy trinity of a Syfy channel original. The equivalent of blacking out drunk, getting robbed, AND shitting your pants. BLACK OPS is the trifecta of misfortune.

The Ascent

TERRIBLE

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