Drop it like it's hot
dir: Christopher Landon
2025
There’s something a bit brave about making a flick dependent on some fad app that is already forgotten by the time audiences get to watch the flick. If there is an app that insists, that allows random fuckheads to force you to download it in order to receive messages which disappear after you look at them, I don’t know about it, but I am aware that people can “drop” messages or photos to each other using a panoply of apps, but it’s already wronger than wrong.
And I don’t care. This story is entirely dependent on these apps to maintain tension or a sense of being surveilled at all times, but it’s bullshit, and it doesn’t matter in the end. The point of the premise is that it’s a thriller premise, and a woman at one location, being a fancy restaurant, is being watched constantly by someone in the restaurant, who forces her to do things because, back at home, her son and sister are being menaced by some jerk with a gun, which she can also see via her phone.
Depending on who you believe, almost everyone in America is either being menaced with a gun in their homes or is doing the menacing themselves at any given moment. The strength or failure of such a premise is entirely dependent on whether we think it’s believable for someone to be trapped in such a way, and to go along with what her antagonists want, until she finds a heroic solution to all her problems. If you buy it, then this flick becomes an exciting thrill ride as a young widow chooses to either go along with or reject the dictates of what the unknown psycho pestering her through her phone is forcing her to do.
I can’t think of many flicks like this, but I’m sure there are a bunch of them. There are plenty of flicks where someone forces the protagonist to do whatever under threat of something worse happening, but I can’t think of too many where someone is restricted to one location and observed from every possible angle which the protagonist can’t figure out for most of the plot.
The only other one I can think of is Nick of Time. You don’t remember Nick of Time? I’m pretty sure I remember it. It starred a young Johnny Depp before we found out what a piece of shit he was, and reliable nutcase Christopher Walken as the bad guy forcing Depp’s character to assassinate a politician upon threat of harm to his daughter, with the majority of the flick confined to a train station.
Never heard of it? Well… Maybe there’s a reason for that. I found it entertaining enough at the time, but I was always a cheap date, and not a very discerning, discriminating viewer. Not like now, eh? So for me, something as contrived as this doesn’t necessarily put me off.
I get the tension. Tension works with me, the way that they make it seem like Violet was pretty much stuffed no matter how subtle or how over the top she goes to try to find a solution. The crafty shitbird in charge has all the angles covered, until they don’t, of course.
As well as coping with the terror of her family being threatened, and with her PTSD from years of being in an abusive relationship that ended in horrible violence, Violet has also very bravely decided, wouldn’t you know it, to brave the dating game and put herself out there for the possibility of romance! So on top of all the other dangers, she is instructed not to tell anyone, including her date, as to what the fuck is up, but also to make sure that her date doesn’t leave, even though the unseen operator is making her act like a crazy person / marionette throughout.
She is told at one point to “smile more”, which, you know, if we didn’t already hate the people doing this to her, damn do we want them to die screaming.
It's a tough juggling act. The date seems understanding and sympathetic enough, but come on. Even if he was sure he was “in”, there’s no way he would put up with her terrified checking of her phone for the four hundredth time, or her demeanour, which is one step shy of seeming like a meth addict desperately aching for her next hit. We know of course, and if we’re half decent people, we sympathise with the fact that she’s dealing with unbearable stress and is desperately trying to think of a solution to an unsolvable problem, but come on.
We know it’s unsolvable because the duration of a flick dictates that there is no solution until much later in the flick. Like, otherwise, it’s people sitting around in bathrobes drinking teas and Milos saying over and over again “wow, that crazy scenario we just survived”, and people agreeing and bringing up some of the more exciting bits. It’s incumbent upon the makers to not only stretch it out but make those intermediate scenes interesting or entertaining enough to stop us from nodding off in the mean time.
I’m not accusing the filmmakers of being that competent, but they at least stretch the flick out a fair bit. The rapport, the vibe between Violet (Meghann Fahy) and Henry (Brandon Sklenar) would seem to be of utmost importance in order to make it more enjoyable for us along the way.
Eh.
Henry’s not bad, but he’s not that interesting, and they don’t really have much chemistry, because the scenario really requires them to open up and talk about themselves only in the moments when Violet briefly forgets what she’s facing and talks honestly about other stuff. But if he doesn’t know what’s going on, and doesn’t figure it out until it’s convenient, then he looks kinda dumb. Which is okay. Little does he know that the unseen antagonists are trying to convince her to murder him.
So, in a perverse kind of way, it is enjoyable to watch a film where the central role is played by a woman and the superfluous, disposable role is played by an attractive lunk of a guy who could be anyone. It all rests on Violet’s slender shoulders.
The lead is pretty good in this flick. She has to convey believable nervousness and steeliness without being allowed to resort to parental action film clichés (just yet). The idea that people will do anything to save their kids is a common movie trope now, but thankfully they’re pulling it back from being a blanket justification for doing terrible things. This is a thriller, not an action flick, so for 80% of its running time it’s a stop-start overly complicated cat and mouse game. The ending turns into bonkers action bullshit that comes out of nowhere, but it’s not so egregious that it sinks the flick, at least for me. I mean, I wanted whoever was doing all of this shit to Violet to come to a painful end, but eh. Maybe not like this, I dunno.
I am also not completely comfortable with the way the domestic violence backstory is woven into the fabric of the story, or how it factors into the ending. I’m not stating anything remarkably insightful by saying domestic violence / intimate partner violence is fucking horrible and it’s awful and its many traumas radiate outwards in ripples impacting survivors and their loved ones for decades to come, but having it used in such a perfunctory manner here, for a kind of punchline ending, is a bit misguided, I felt. It didn’t detract from the central performance or her great character work, but even if the ending “works” as a way of resolving things, wow, it’s a horrible way to say “she’s all better now”.
And it’s thematically ugly. Way to get over your guilt and trauma, Violet, by killing some random goon. That’s the American Way!
It all comes down to Meghann. This is a very different role from the only other thing I’ve ever seen her in, being that one season of The White Lotus where white American people acted awfully at some luxury resort overseas somewhere. She acquits herself well enough. I don’t know if it will result in more film roles where she’s all nervous and jumpy for 90 minutes before turning into Sarah Conner and killing peeps with her mighty biceps, but that wouldn’t be a bad thing either.
Drop is one of countless 2025 films that will be forgotten in a couple of months, but it’s a pretty good thriller, and pretty good thrillers are pretty rare these days. Shitty thrillers are a dime a dozen, so I’ll generously settle for pretty good.
7 times I still have no idea how or why the windows exploded at the end out of 10
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“You lost the moment you walked into this restaurant.” – careful, you could be saying the same thing about the movie audience - Drop
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