Metacritic reviews

Kosinski has already made one of the year's best movies with Maverick, and with an extremely intriguing concept and fantastic performances all around the board, Kosinski has for the second time this year made one of the best movies of this summer.

Spiderhead is a movie that defies conventional genre labels, and while Kosinski isn't always successful in balancing the various elements, I have to admit: this is one hell of a ride.

It’s a thriller at times, but also a wickedly funny dark comedy. And it features a nostalgia-inducing yacht rock soundtrack that slyly comments on the action.

While you will get sturdy popcorn pleasures from Spiderhead, you’ll also leave wondering what more possibilities Hemsworth holds as an actor once he lays his hammer down.

It’s a mixed bag in itself, but squeezing Chris Hemsworth into an outside-the-box role in between “Thor” outings and having him face-off with Teller in a simple story with a high-end setting and “human choice” morality pays off.

It may not do anything particularly innovative from either a storytelling or filmmaking perspective, but Spiderhead is proof there's still material to be mined from well-known ground when talented people are bringing the narrative to life.

Overall it’s a very odd, slightly awkward film, as one of a design nerd dealing with sex, trauma, and big pharma malfeasance probably should be. Yet there’s intriguing tension between the lame quips and wink-wink soft-rock soundtrack.

For a movie so preoccupied with the choices that people can make, Spiderhead invariably makes the least interesting ones available to it, which is a serious problem for a movie streaming on a platform whose subscribers are never far removed from the choice to be watching something else instead.

A nice, creepy performance from Hemsworth, with Teller gamely going along with the script, but having stretched out the story idea to feature-film length, the film doesn’t really give the sense that it knows where it is going.

Kosinski is a gifted director, but his specialty is juggling human elements with complex visual effects. He is not cut out for this kind of comedy. His design choices are all wrong. The execution is tone deaf.