Rim Of The World (2019) - Movie Review

The latest release from mediocre action director McG wouldn’t even cause a blip on my radar usually. After 2017’s The Babysitter, a surprisingly fun slice of splatstick horror, I’m willing to give the man another chance. I mean, that film had him venturing right out of his comfort zone and that seems to be a good fit for him, and his latest is a coming-of-age sci-fi adventure flick that looks like one big load of 80’s Spielberg worship. I’ll admit, I was genuinely looking forward to this one. It took less than ten minutes for me to realise that I had made a terrible mistake.

McG seems to be hanging on to his metafiction kick from Babysitter, as this film’s script is full of references to other movies and the clichés there in. However, unlike Babysitter, it acknowledges story and character clichés but doesn’t actually do anything with them, assuming that merely admitting that it’s made from familiar parts will excuse the lack of finesse in how they’re put together.

The big hallmark of this is through the inclusion of Benjamin Flores Jr. in the main group as Dariush, a black rich kid who is so stereotyped that it hurts to think about. When the black camp counsellors make jokes about why they’re talking like black guys from the 80’s, it feels less self-aware and more just an excuse to have a black supporting character who is heavily characterised as both the bumbling fool and the consistent coward of the group. Classy.

The problems with this whole thing only spread out from there, with Zack Stentz’s script pushing cringe-inducing joke after cringe-inducing joke into the audience’s faces, giving that unfortunate feeling whenever you watch a comedian keep bombing on stage. The aforementioned moment of ‘Oh no, what have I done?’ came with a female camp counsellor telling Dariush to “take it out and put it in my box”. Yes, she’s referring to his phone, and yes, it did set the tone for how painfully try-hard the humour in this thing is.

While a few scenes flirt with claustrophobic horror relating to the big alien threat, rendered in quite atrocious fashion, it mainly sticks to McG’s wheelhouse when it comes to action. And between the CGI quality, the constant shaky-cam, and the glaringly oversaturated colour palette, it somehow makes this mess feel like it’s taking a whole lot longer to finish than it actually does.

This isn’t helped by what barely constitutes the plot in this thing, working as a pit-stop-less road trip taking the leads from the titular adventure camp to a government facility to stop the alien attack. Just getting from point A to point B, with some astonishingly tacky licensed music picks along the way so that McG can remind us all that he used to be competent when it came to music videos, acting largely as an excuse for the action (which sucks) and the dialogue (which sucks harder).

And it can’t even get coming-of-age pathos right on top of all this. It tries to push the same overcoming of fear that made Cole’s character arc in Babysitter so entertaining, except it fails for the same reason as the pretences at being genre-savvy: It recognises how tropey its own writing is, but doesn’t do anything with it. We have the timid leader, the comic relief black kid, the inordinately insightful orphan and the older loner. They try for a ‘we’re more than just our labels’ moment near the end, but with how plain their writing and, quite frankly, their performances are, it’s difficult to buy into any of it.

I’m willing to accept that me being in this position of disappointment is largely my own doing, but then again, there is a reason why I gave McG a chance to show his worth because Babysitter seriously is that damn good. Instead, it seems like he abandoned everything that made that turnaround work, only keeping enough to let him carry on doing the exact same thing that made me write him off in the first place.