The Wages of Fear (2024) Review

Plot: To prevent a deadly explosion, an illicit crack team has 24 hours to drive two truckloads of nitroglycerin across a desert laden with danger.

Review: It seems like I’m always on the cusp of cancelling my Netflix account. Every time I fall in love with a series, they go and cancel it just as it’s getting really compelling, and the standalone pickings lately have been especially sparse – reality TV garbage, Hallmark channel wannabes, and comedy specials that simply aren’t funny. You know, the stuff that holds absolutely zero appeal. And yet, just as I’m about to pull the trigger on saving me $20 a month, they’ll churn out a few decent straight-to-video actioners, both foreign and domestic, that are JUST good enough to keep me hanging around (yes, Extraction 2, Triple Frontier, and Close, I’m talking about you.)

That’s not to say that the streaming giant’s latest action import, The Wages of Fear, is a tour-de-force shoot-em-up that’s worth the price of admission alone. It’s not, I assure you. I mean, let’s be honest… if you’re only going to see one desert-themed action/drama flick this year, with explosions and familial strife galore, make sure it’s Dune 2: Even Duneier. But, if you’ve got a bit of extra room in your schedule, you could do worse than Netflix’s French offering.

To its credit, The Wages of Fear does have manage to stand out a bit from its peers, by virtue of the overall subject matter and the way some scenes unfold. It gets a lot of things wrong, believe me, but its heart is in the right place, and most of the cast throw themselves into their roles with gusto.

IMDB has the film’s plot as follows: In order to prevent a deadly explosion, an illicit crack team has 24 hours to drive two truckloads of nitroglycerine across a desert laden with danger.

Boy howdy, you gotta love the quality of some of these IMDB entries, no? All filler and no killer. Why is the team illicit? What are they crackalackin’ at, exactly? In truth, an “illicit crack team” makes them sound like desert dwelling drug dealers who just happen to moonlight as delivery drivers for dangerous ordnance. But, I digress…

What you really need to know is this: Netflix’s 2024 version of The Wages of Fear is a low-budget remake of the original The Wages of Fear from 1953. The overall plot is the same (transporting nitroglycerin across the desert to prevent an oil drill fire from destroying a neighboring village), but one of the roles has been gender-swapped, and two of the men are now brothers. To the film’s credit, the familial aspect looms large over the whole proceedings, and does add a bit of gravitas to an otherwise humdrum affair.

The first characters we are introduced to are Clara, a French NGO employee helping out in a nameless Middle Eastern village, and Fred, who makes a living as a bodyguard for the whole operation. He’s a stoic badass, she’s an expressive badass, and they’re having quite the physical affair behind the scenes. But, as we learn from an extended flashback, Fred is haunted by the inadvertent incarceration of his brother Alex (an explosives expert) who was nabbed by the authorities after accidentally killing a few of their number during a heist gone wrong.

It’s all a bit convoluted (and at times very convenient), but eventually Fred and Alex are reunited by the (nameless, once again) oil company, with the common cause to transport nitroglycerine across the desert. Oh, and Fred is also looking over Alex’s wife and daughter, out in the middle of a foreign desert, because… reasons. Also, Clara knows the roads like nobody else, so she’ll be accompanying the team as a navigator, and also to add that extra dynamic of “hey, they’re fucking during their downtime, so that’ll up the stakes a bit”.

Anyways, the plot is complex, overwrought, and kinda silly, but both Franck Gastambide (as Fred) and Alban Lenoir (as Alex) do a passage job at making us care about the brothers’ plight and eventual reconciliation. They are both pretty chiseled alpha-males, a point which is hammered home by Alex’s bare-knuckled prison fights. The dude is ripped, I’ll give him that. Unfortunately, the supporting characters are a mixed bag: Sofiane Zermani as fellow bodyguard Gauthier is quite good at portraying a slimy asshole, while some of the others come and go without much rhyme, reason, or impact.

But enough about the plot and thespians, what about the action? Well, that’s a mixed bag as well. There are a few halfway decent shootouts to be had, especially in the beginning where we see Fred’s bodyguard experience come into play. His weapon of choice actually makes tactical sense, and the way in which his fellow bodyguards dispatch some hapless soldiers is rather entertaining. The Wages of Fear does actually have a few moments of thoughtful staging, and some of the choreography isn’t half bad. Seeing as how it’s ultimately “convoy cinema”, with trucks moving stuff from point A to point B while opposing forces try to stop them, there are the requisite automotive shenanigans. The handful of vehicle chase scenes, while slow by necessity (nitroglycerine is prone to exploding with very little effort), at least offer a bit of excitement, including what is likely a fun, albeit unintentional, callback to Sarah Connor’s pipe bomb tossing in the first Terminator movie.

And yet, for everything the movie gets right, it also stumbles quite often, making some very “Hollywood-esque” mistakes along the way. For instance, when the convoy is trapped at a roadblock, surrounded on all sides by militants (who have the high ground, might I add) armed with AK-47s and other assault rifles, our plucky “illicit crack team” takes nearly all of them out with pistols. I think one of the good guys had an AR variant. One dude only. Maybe the average viewer won’t care much for tactical accuracy, but, come on, film crew… a squad of 20 soldiers armed with assault rifles (and one technical with a heavy machine gun, now that I think about it) surrounding a handful of men carrying pistols who happen to be huddled around trucks carrying volatile explosives, and the pistols win the day? Not bloody likely.

During one of the chase scenes, Gauthier also uses a pistol to dispatch the pursuing vehicles, despite carrying an AR-15 (with a holographic sight) in the very next scene. Why is he using a handgun to engage moving targets at range when he would have far more accuracy, not to mention more bullets, if he used the assault rifle? We will never know…

And then, as a cherry on top, the team encounters the world’s worst sniper, who manages to hit absolutely nothing despite being in an ideal shooting position and armed with what appears to be a halfway decent rifle. Like, seriously, she just pops up while they are trapped in a minefield, and we don’t even know why the hell a solo sniper would just be hanging out in that particular stretch of nowhere. They even make her a woman, which seems unnecessarily sexist.

As a professional courtesy, I won’t comment on the CGI-enhanced explosions, of which there are many. This IS low-budget cinema, after all. Some corners were bound to be cut. At least a couple of actual vehicles get destroyed during the proceedings, which is always a good time.

The ending, which I won’t spoil here, manages to be both overly melodramatic but also rather fitting. It actually sort of made sense, considering how the drama was playing out. And, while I can’t exactly comment on the science of using explosives to stop an even bigger explosion, it does seem kinda silly when put into action.

At the end of the day, I’ve certainly seen worst attempts at an action film than The Wages of Fear. I watched it while exercising, and it passed the time decently well. I cannot stack it up against the 1953 original, which I have not seen, but I was never really bored with this 2024 remake. There were a handful of unexpected twists and turns, and the estranged bothers aspect gave it a bit more heft than it otherwise would have had. It’s not something I’ll ever feel compelled to watch again, but if you’ve got the time, The Wages of Fear is a decent actioner worth streaming at least once.