Vicky Jewson’s “Close” transparently aspires to be something of a female riff on Jason Bourne. However, shot in only 29 days — and with a fraction of the budget for an average Hollywood blockbuster — it feels more like a proof-of-concept for an idea that the film industry has already proven (e.g. “Salt,” Tomb Raider,” “Haywire,” etc), and a dull reminder that studios need to invest more of their resources into it. Whatever inherent value there might be in gender-flipping such a generic template is mitigated by the movie’s reluctance to seize on the unique energy that its women bring to the table.

The film doesn’t have to justify casting a lead who isn’t named Chris or Matt, but Jewson…

Noomi Rapace (Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan) is a badass, pure and simple. And in Close she does it again, playing battle-hardened bodyguard Sam Carlson. Sam, is all business, hired to protect a spoiled mining heiress played by the Sophie Nélisse (Book Thief), with the talented Indira Varma (Rome, GoT) as her mother.

Overall, the action scenes are gritty fun and quite riveting, especially the first sequence which demonstrates how badass Sam the bodyguard really is. However, beyond these action sequences, the script which is written and directed by Vicky Jewson, is somewhat lacking in plot complexity. And unfortunately on multiple occasions I found myself guessing what was going to happen next. When an assassination…

Netflix’s Close is an action film that succeeds in crafting authentic female characters.

Written and directed by Vicky Jewson, Close was inspired by the life of female bodyguard Jacquie Davis. The character-driven action thriller tells a story of survival and the destructive actions of corporate greed. But tied to all this are two female characters who are complex and whose relationship is the film’s foundation.

Close opens with the film’s protagonist, Sam (Noomi Rapace), in the middle of a war zone. As a counter-terrorism expert, this is what she’s used to. But she is taken out of her usual element when she is assigned to essentially babysit the spoiled heiress Zoe (Sophie Nélisse), who is to inherit the fortune of…

Who do you think you are?
-Zoe Tanner

An below average action thriller that somehow hornswoggled Noomi Rapace to star in it. I wondered how writer/director Vicky Jewson got her to be in the film, which led me to wonder who Jewson is as I’ve never heard of her and I just ended up with more questions the further I looked into it.

This is Jewson’s third film, her two previous ones were critically panned but I noticed that she had won an award for film making. More precisely she won the Arts, Media & Culture Woman of the Future Award for her exceptional work directing Lady Godiva. Here’s what’s bizarre; she won that award in November 2006, before she had…

Noomi Rapace almost has enough action movie presence to carry a shitty production by herself. Almost.

The only redeeming features of this film are its fight scenes, and Rapace is one of the select group of female actors working today with enough physicality to convincingly sell brawling violence. Close reaches its apex with a nice extended sequence in which a handcuffed Sam Carlson (Rapace) tangles with a henchman in an increasingly brutal encounter. The level of nastiness in that fight was noteworthy enough to take some of the sting out of yet another bad decision to slum the Netflix-exclusive lands.

Other than that, Vicky Jewson sloppily perpetrates a wasted outing in what could have been a decent cinematic violence fix…