Summary
Below Zero has Con Air written all over it, but a lack of personality and charm holds it back. Instead, it travels a well-worn road with a few bumps, but just about gets where it’s going.
You can see it in the setup. Below Zero might have swapped the plane for a bus, instead relying on the environment to create that high-stakes danger, but the early, overly patient sequences are so familiar that you can’t help but notice. Prepping the prisoners for transport serves as a meet-and-greet, and there’s even a beat lifted directly, when a personal possession of a prisoner is taken away by the officers and will surely be returned later, perhaps by force. You get the idea. The assembled madmen are a far cry from Cyrus the Virus and Garland Greene, but one of them is of particular importance to a third-party interloper, given the whole thing a slightly different vibe. That tinge of mystery, though, isn’t enough to sustain an audience through an hour and forty-five minutes that feels longer than that.
Gutiérrez, in the lead, seems to be making a point of cropping up in Spanish Netflix movies; The Occupant and Mirage both featured him, though Below Zero, geared much more to an international audience, might be the role that gives him a bit more Stateside traction. The film’s playing the usual mass-market beats on the way to a relatively perfunctory ending designed not to split opinion; there are bumps on the road along the way, but the film more or less gets where it’s going without much fuss.