Anthony Mackie, who is already a big star, is about to really blow up next February with the release of Captain America: Brave New World. Before we get to that, though, he leads the new film Elevation from director George Nolfi (The Adjustment Bureau, The Banker). Co-starring Morena Baccarin, who knows a thing or two about superhero movies herself, Elevation is not another comic book movie, but is instead another monster movie.

The success of A Quiet Place in 2018 has produced a wave of post-apocalyptic horror thrillers with characters running from giant monsters at the end of the world. Some have been good, some bad. Sadly, Elevation finds itself somewhere in the forgettable middle. It’s unable to, pun intended, elevate itself beyond its gimmicks and tropes to become anything memorable, and its monsters leave a lot to be desired. It’s lazy and uninspired, but if there’s anything to hold onto, it’s that Anthony Mackie has become such a great leading man that he can take the most bland material and make it at least watchable through a sheer act of will.

What Is ‘Elevation’ About?
Some of the best monster movies are built on an intriguing gimmick. In A Quiet Place, you can’t make a noise because the aliens with supersonic hearing will be able to detect you. In Tremors, you had to pretend the floor was lava and stay off of it because the giant worms under the ground would be able to sense your movement. Elevation works in a similar but less interesting way. The film opens three years after an earth-destroying incident, when monsters came out of the ground and began killing every human in sight. They left animals intact, however, as scenes show wild horses and buffalo thriving. Just like the monsters in A Quiet Place and Tremors, these beasts are heavily armored and can’t be killed with a simple gunshot, so people have fled from them. In doing so, we discovered the one weakness of the creatures: for whatever reason, they will not go beyond 8,000 feet above sea level. Elevation! Get it!

The heroes we focus on are based in the Rocky Mountains, just outside of Boulder, Colorado. Several groups of refugee camps exist in the mountains, and in one, Will (Mackie), lives with his young son, Hunter (Danny Boyd Jr.). Will’s wife has passed away at the hands of the monsters and Hunter suffers from a lung disease he’s had since birth. The thin air of the mountains surely isn’t doing him any favors, and Hunter often needs to be hooked up to a machine to help him breathe. While this is not the ideal way to live, it’s sustainable, at least until the filters for Hunter’s machine run out. Now Will has no choice but to go below the elevation line and seek more filters at the Boulder hospital. The moment Will goes below 8,000 feet, his life will be in danger from the giant monsters that lurk around any corner, but it’s a risk he must take for his son’s life.

Going with Will are Katie (Maddie Hasson), who never fails to speak her mind, and Nina (Baccarin), who has a background in science and has been working on a theory that might lead to a way to kill the monsters. Together they will go below the elevation line and into the destroyed city of Boulder, but will they all come back? It’s an interesting premise, but it also makes no sense. The logic of it is not explained to us, but we do get multiple silly scenes of a character running up a mountain, a creature running behind them, only for the protagonist to reach a lined boundary that marks 8,000 feet, where they cross it just in time. Something inside the creatures tells them they can’t go any further, and they turn back. While it could be interesting not to explain too much about why this is, Elevation overexplains so much else with huge exposition dumps. A scene in a tunnel sounds like it was written by someone trying to fill up pages with dialogue rather than showing us the details through the plot.

Anthony Mackie and Morena Baccarin Have Little Chemistry Together

Elevation is a thin story with every trope and stereotype you’ve seen from better monster movies. You know exactly who’s going to live and who’s going to die. There’s even a drawn-out scene you can predict from 8,000 feet away where a protagonist is in peril as the monsters approach, only for someone else to show up at the last second and save them.

This could be helped if the plot followed characters we cared about. Tremors is nothing without the friendship between Earl (Fred Ward) and Val (Kevin Bacon). A Quiet Place is just a gimmick without the complex family we follow through those events. Elevation doesn’t have much of that. Sure, we feel for Will because his son is sick, and we want him to be saved, but outside that, there’s not a lot going on. Katie is shown to be a close friend of Will’s, but we have no reason to care if she lives or dies outside the fact that she’s a person and Will’s friend.

Related The 10 Best Anthony Mackie Movies, Ranked Nothing but respect for our Captain America.

Then there’s Nina. She’s the one with the brains who can save humanity, but her character feels more like a plot device than anything else. She’s the one to give us exposition about the monsters, and she’s the one Will has an external conflict because of an incident that happened with his late wife. She gives us no background on who she is until the end of the third act, but by then it’s forced in, again for the plot’s sake. Sadly, Anthony Mackie and Morena Baccarin have no chemistry together, not because they’re bad actors, but because they clearly are good ones to have had their success. It’s that they have little to do but spit out their rehearsed lines and run from a CGI monster who isn’t there. If they weren’t in Elevation, you have to imagine that it would have gone straight to digital.

‘Elevation’s Monsters Are Nothing To Be Afraid Of
Image via Vertical

Elevation isn’t a bad movie exactly. If you’re bored on a rainy weekend and want a way to kill 90 minutes with a movie that won’t make you feel much, this is it. It won’t insult your intelligence, you won’t hate it, but it’s so empty that it’ll be gone from your brain in no time. It’s all so quickly thrown together and uninspired.

But what about the monsters? Do they look cool at least? Tremors had some great practical effects with its worms, and although the A Quiet Place aliens are CGI creations, John Krasinski put a lot of effort into their design and went back to the drawing board when the first look wasn’t right. For Elevation, it’s as if they went with their first idea and stuck with it. At the beginning of the first act, the monsters are briefly kept hidden, and you might think this is how they’re going to be portrayed, but within minutes we see them clearly in the light, and it’s kept that way multiple times throughout. Kudos for being confident enough to show them off rather than hiding them in the shadows, but Elevation’s monsters are nothing to be scared of. They look like silly, scrapped versions of the A Quiet Place creatures or what you’d find in one of the bad Tremors sequels. Again, just like everything else, they’re not awful, and they won’t make you laugh, but they are dull, and twenty-four hours after watching the movie, I’m struggling to remember exactly what they looked like.

One thing Elevation arguably does a good job with is not telling us what the monsters are early on. Are they from Earth? Are they aliens? The last few minutes finally drops the truth in what is supposed to be a twist shocker, but there’s no jolt to it. Instead, it’s just another info dump like everything else. If you love end-of-the-world monster movies, you could do worse than Elevation, but if you want to see Anthony Mackie used to his full potential, you’re going to have to wait until he picks up a certain famous shield.

You’ve seen this monster movie done before in much more compelling stories.ProsThe initial premise is enough to get your attention.Anthony Mackie is convincing even when everything else suffers. ConsIt becomes bogged down in its gimmick.The main characters have zero chemistry.Rather than showing, it depends on way too much exposition.The mosnster design isn’t scary in the slightest.

n the post-apocalyptic Rockies, a father and two women risk their lives by facing monstrous creatures to save a young boy.Release Date November 8, 2024 Director George Nolfi Cast Anthony Mackie , Morena Baccarin , Maddie Hasson , Danny Boyd Jr. , Ian Hummel , Shauna Earp , James Anthony Perez , Dave Malkoff , Drexel Malkoff , Mike Hickman , Gregg S. Perry , Dalila Orozco Runtime 90 Minutes

Elevation is now playing in theaters in the U.S. Click below for showtimes.

Get tickets