‘The Belko Experiment’ Review Roundup: Bloody Flick Leaves Critics Wanting More

The Belko Experiment is an action-horror film set in a workplace in Bogotá, Colombia. Belko is a corporation helping Americans outsource jobs to South America, so the office we are focused on contains 80 Americans, each with what they think is a tiny tracking device under their skin to prevent from kidnapping. What they soon find out is that those devices are actually tiny bombs to be used when this “experiment” gets under way.

The malicious voice in charge comes over the loudspeaker of the office and breaks the news that everyone is now part of a game. They must kill three colleagues to survive. If they don’t, six will be chosen at random to have their tiny bombs denoted.

The film continues in this way, overlooking any chance at satire and humor and inserting gruesome violence and action. Director Greg McLean and screenwriter James Gunn created this piece that garnered a measly 48% on rottentomatoes. John Gallagher, Jr., Tony Goldwyn, and John C. McGinley star.

THE BELKO EXPERIMENT REVIEW ROUNDUP

The Belko Experiment, a film written by James Gunn named after the company where the workers turn savage, could have been sociologically meaningful or even satirically amusing. Instead, it’s just a bloodbath — though “bath” seems inadequate to describe the quantity of gore on offer. Blood ocean, maybe, or blood volcano… As things turn chaotic, the movie attempts to be a parable about what happens when a tiny group gets broken off from civility a la Lord of the Flies but there winds up being little in the way of meaning to anything, and the end arrives without an explanation or a twist to put everything in focus. For all its promise to be a wry commentary on the savagery of office politics, The Belko Experiment is more like an experiment in how many cracked-open skulls can be crammed into one movie.”
–Kyle Smith, New York Post

“Belko trends too proudly toward ultraviolence, but there’s true-pulp transgression in the film’s shamelessly sick kicks. A mass execution starts off troubling and then, somehow, becomes hilarious… If “hilarious mass execution” sounds upsetting, I shouldn’t mention the exploding heads. We live in disturbing times. Belko is an appropriately disreputable, gleefully disturbing movie.”
–Darren Franich, Entertainment Weekly

“It’s a story format with which we’ve become familiar: Unwitting civilians are placed in a controlled environment where they are compelled by a Big Brother type to kill or be killed. The variable is always the “why…” Confined to this sterile office space, The Belko Experiment descends into a meaningless orgy of murder. By the end of the film, you’re left with the unshakable feeling that everyone involved, from actors to filmmakers to the audience, is, and should have been, better than material like this.”
–Katie Walsh, Los Angeles Times

“Directed with a nice balance of humor and horror by Greg McLean, The Belko Experiment is a fun ride through a bizarro version of the corporate workplace. Any movie that includes death by tape dispenser is worth seeing.”
–Rafer Guzmán, Newsday