TEXAS, USA — Given how essential an element Jennifer Lopez’s physicality was in 2019’s career-reigniting “Hustlers,” it’s hard not to think things have come awkwardly full circle five years (and many missed chances to capitalize) later when she spends a good third of Netflix’s scifi Mad Libs exercise “Atlas” strapped to the inside of a sarcastic talking mech, limiting the performance to her face and vocal intonations that snap from graceful to gritty faster than you can ask: “COVID production?”
By this point things appear to have reached rock bottom in the snappy but overly familiar and derivative “Atlas,” a bafflingly cheap-looking amalgam of “I, Robot,” “Terminator” and “Edge of Tomorrow” that can’t find the sweet spot between apocalyptic stakes and the chaotic-crowdpleaser angle its most memorable scenes are trying to carve out. Nearly 30 years into a war between humanity and AI, Lopez’s Atlas Shepherd – an analyst whose personal connection to the conflict’s origins have her distrustful of anything robotic – is wandering inside wisecracking robot suit Smith through a hostile planet that’s home base to the enemy leader (a stilted Simu Liu). She’ll have to get over her grudges and make nice with the good-boy A.I. (voiced by Gregory James Cohan) if they have any chance at defeating the bad-boy robots.
Given we’ve just seen Lopez struggling to embody Atlas’ anguished history in the movie’s early scenes, it doesn’t appear to bode well for the actress when she crash-lands in Smith and doesn’t dare leave the suit, lest she get blown to bits.
But lately she’s been appearing in distinctly different genre projects for streamers like she’s collecting Infinity Stones, and it’s possible what she was dialed in for in director Brad Peyton’s “Atlas” was a single-location thriller with a touch of sincerity and a whole lot of smart-aleck badassery. Her desperation and fortitude in the thick of enemy firefights, balanced out by her learning the importance of letting go of the past to confront the present, is more than convincing enough that you suddenly find yourself wishing anything else in the movie felt half as tangible. She capably turns being trapped into a nice metaphor for gut-punch therapy, and while "Atlas" (penned by Leo Sardarian and Aron Eli Coleite) may use the tropes and imagery of big-scale scifi action, that’s really just the hard outer shell to the movie’s character-study circuitry.
Not that that distinction contains enough nuance to make “Atlas” all that notable. This is still a movie with weightless proclamations about nuclear Armageddon; still a movie that can’t be bothered to explain what keeps AI like Smith from being corrupted; still a movie that elicits quiet snickers when it’s trying to elicit awe; still a movie with such spare worldbuilding that we don’t care about the world trying to save itself; still a movie that makes you wish you were seeing the fake movie-within-a-movie spectacle from “The Fall Guy” instead.
At least Lopez, by the end, liberates herself through a third-act set piece that accomplishes a moderate amount of hair-raising not because of the hazy action but because of the shrieks, screams and sneers of a central performance that’s become perfectly primal. But the bigger “Atlas” decides to lean, the more its potential shrinks—by movie’s end, Lopez’s starpower is grazing uncomfortably against yet another streaming snoozer that doesn’t know how to match it.
"Atlas" is now streaming on Netflix. It's rated PG-13 for strong scifi violence, action, bloody images and strong language. Runtime: 1 hour, 58 minutes.
Starring Jennifer Lopez, Simu Liu, Sterling K. Brown, Gregory James Cohan
Directed by Brad Peyton; written by Leo Sardarian and Aron Eli Coleite
2024
