Home Video: 'Kill Switch'

Kill Switch, with its 12% positive, is a great argument against using a movie's Rotten Tomatoes rating as the ultimate standard. It's sure to find an audience on home video and a long life on cable. The gamers and kids will get it: watch its reputation improve as those kids grow up and take over the conversation.

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Dan Stevens, fresh off his excellent turn in the weird Marvel sci-fi series Legion, plays another American in Kill Switch. His character Will Porter is daredevil military pilot recruited to work with a private company that claims to have developed an unlimited energy source. Once they flip the switch to turn on the power, Porter's tasked with flipping the kill switch.

How the movie was made is a big part of why it's interesting. Director Tim Smit did most of the special effects himself and figured out a way that only required four days of work from Stevens. There's a lot of first-person video-game style perspective from his character and Stevens added the voiceover for those scenes after Smit had done much of the effects work.

Like last year's Hardcore Henry, Kill Switch is an attempt to reinvent the feature film by someone who grew up watching video games. While the effects in the movie don't match what you'll see in Star Wars or the latest Marvel movie, they're far beyond what you would've seen in a sci-fi movie even 10 years ago.

Smit is pushing the envelope here and his commentary and the included featurette is fascinating. Sci-fi fans will be able to figure out the plot twists early on and the script isn't as good as what you get when you watch Legion or Westworld. That doesn't mean Kill Switch isn't fascinating. If you're looking for clues about where independent sci-fi and action pictures might go in the next decade, have a double-feature movie night and watch this one alongside Hardcore Henry.