Early on in Sacrifice, we find freshly disgraced movie star Mike Tyler (Chris Evans) entering a Greek-island charity gala beneath a neon sign reading Make Earth Cool Again, just as the emcee is wrapping up a spiel about Hephaestus, the Greek god of fire, blacksmiths, and underground furnaces. Myth tells us Hephaestus made the gods’ weapons by firing up an active volcano like a mythological easy bake oven, with probably the carbon footprint you'd expect.
It's the last we hear of Hephaestus. A shame. Sacrifice might have been something if the filmmakers had left it in his oven a little longer.
The irony of invoking the Greek god of molten metal beneath neon pleas for a cooler Earth may be the last thing the film puts on screen that lands neatly, but the whole thing isn't hopeless from there. Far from it. For most of its 100 minutes, Sacrifice feels perpetually five minutes and one decent punchline away from becoming an effective satire. Or at least that close to having a fucking point.
As the gala guests pull up footage of Tyler's fall from grace on their phones, we learn that his Tom-Cruise-on-Oprah moment involved a flamethrower instead of a couch. Turns out that recreational arson is a pretty effective way to lose a career and gain a fan club at the same time.
Hosting the shindig is Ben Bracken (Vincent Cassel), a bald-headed billionaire bearing absolutely no resemblance to the founder of any company that rhymes with glamazon. Bracken has just solved global warming, a feat he apparently considers best celebrated by flying a roomful of wealthy people to a Greek island to congratulate him. His wife Gloria's (Salma Hayek) interest in Tyler seems to bother him, though not nearly as much as the arrival of a bunch of uninvited teenage eco-terrorists.
Unfortunately for the young revolutionaries, they choose possibly the worst moment to make an entrance and be taken seriously. Bracken’s soiree is in the middle of the pre-dinner entertainment, a delirious neon spectacle that looks like an early-2000s Madonna music video got drunk and decided to produce an Earth Day PSA.
Their leader Joan, played by Anya Taylor-Joy in a very Anya Taylor-Joy role, is completely fucking bonkers and promptly abducts Tyler, Bracken, and the poor girl hired to play Daughter Earth.
From there, the plot is about as relevant to what’s going on as Hephaestus is to modern defense contractors.
The almost-there frustration that Sacrifice dangles out in front of the audience for nearly its entire runtime is enabled, in no small part, by its all-star cast being plugged into roles they’re all perfectly capable of handing in for assembly into a better movie. Evans, to be sure, is the only one of the bunch at all outside of his assigned wheelhouse, but his performance as the self-absorbed and hilariously inane Tyler is so good that the film feels like it’s still a success for him even if it fails to erupt overall.
John Malkovich arrives midway through the ordeal as Joan's prepper father, whose lectures to his daughter offer writer-director Romain Gavras a golden opportunity to articulate whatever the fuck he's trying to say with all this.
Not a dehydrated olive branch Gavras felt like seizing, I guess.
Further complicating Gavras’s attempts to land something about this thing and leave us feeling like we were ever airborne is his overstuffed catalog of would-be critiques. Are we mocking male egos, environmental galas attended exclusively by guests who’ve arrived via private jet, Billionaires with alopecia, or just eco-terrorist cells whose members look like they need permission slips to attend the revolution?
Tell me we’re not here to make fun of Madonna in the aughts.
The potential victims of this failed satire are all low-hanging targets, but Gavras somehow makes picking them off look like scaling an active volcano. Even if the cast is more than capable of making the climb, the director appears to have forgotten his hiking boots.
Maybe he doesn’t need any.
Sacrifice remains watchable, even as every promising idea gets tossed into the furnace before it can amount to anything. But all of what goes into the incinerator just feels so needlessly wasted.
Hephaestus, at least, understood the basic principle of an oven. Eventually, you're supposed to take something out.
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