OFF THE GRID (2025) - Mark Reviews Movies

Off the Grid, Lionsgate

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 26, 2025

As a thriller, Off the Grid could be better, but all things considered, this movie with barely a plot or a budget of which to speak could have been much worse, too. It's about as middle-of-the-road of these things get.

A lot of that comes down to the eventual simplicity of Jim Agnew's screenplay, which pits one man against a team trying to capture him for nefarious reasons, and the surprisingly effective cast. Josh Duhamel stars as the guy, conveniently named Guy, being hunted, and Greg Kinnear plays his former friend and colleague, tasked with finding Guy and returning him to a tech company. Guy stole his creation after learning that company has plans to weaponize it.

As for what the device or coding or whatever does, that detail is so irrelevant that it's not worth remembering—if Agnew actually includes any hint or even explicit description of the thing, which, again, is easy to forget. The point is that Kinnear's Ranish needs to find Guy to find whatever it is that does whatever the hell it is that it does. That's because his boss, played by Peter Stormare, knows the whatsit is incredibly valuable to whoever would use it in its weaponized form. When Stormare yells and threatens and stares straight down the barrel of the camera with anger in his eyes, it's probably a good idea to do whatever he says.

If the money here mostly went to casting these three actors, it was a budgetary line item well-allotted. Duhamel is quite convincing and charming as surely the strangest and most unlikely tech genius one could imagine—a man so devoted to computers that he can create this elusive MacGuffin but also such a dirt-beneath-his-fingernails sort of man that he's essentially a rugged survivalist of utmost talent. This guy can hack one of the most secure tech companies in all the world, but he can just as skillfully craft all sorts of weapons and explosives with anything he can find in the wild or buy at the little shop in a tiny town.

That's eventually the setup of the plot of director Johnny Martin's movie, and when it becomes a battle of wits between Guy and Ranish's squad of well-armed mercenaries in the woods, this is a fairly enjoyable affair. Sure, some of that is an ironic sort of entertainment, because the entire premise of this is inherently silly, but a decent amount of that enjoyment is sincere, too. A competently executed game of cat-and-mouse will do that, and at times, the movie is simply and effectively just that.

Everything else, then, mostly gets in the way of the material's most foundational instincts. It requires far too much exposition, for example, and too many characters to get started. Guy has found a remote and, until he starts looking into his former employer's network, untraceable location in a forest in the Southeastern United States.

There, he spends his days merely surviving off the land and picking up the occasional provisions from a nearby town. He has made friends with Chase (Michael Zapesotsky), the teenaged clerk at a general store with dreams of going to college on a scholarship, and has caught the eye of Josey (María Elisa Camargo), the owner of the local bar who likes the way he handles her satellite dish when it needs technical assistance. That's not a euphemism, but the way Josey looks at Guy makes it feel as if it could be.

Anyway, Kinnear's character, who's amusingly ill-equipped and unprepared and completely disinterested in doing this kind of armed abduction of an old friend, ends up hunting Guy after Marcus (Ricky Russert), a theoretically more capable man for the job, fails spectacularly in a first attempt (He ends up killing more of his own men than Guy injures with booby traps). The thinking behind Stormare's Belcor in sending Ranish, then, is completely counterintuitive, but if such things don't worry the filmmakers and result in Kinnear having some fun with his unlikely antagonist, maybe they shouldn't concern us, either.

There's a stretch of plot here that works as a grounded thriller, as Guy sets up assorted traps and tries to stay a step ahead of his foes, while the bad guys repeatedly fall for those snares and keep getting closer to catching their target. To be sure, this is basic stuff in terms of plotting and staging, but to be fair, a good number of movies with more money behind them and more at stake don't always get even those basics right.

Still, the movie is too ridiculous and unnecessarily busy for its own good, which is too bad for the parts and performances that are effective. When it becomes a barebones actioner with nothing else on its mind, Off the Grid makes us wish the rest of the movie were as tightly constructed and to-the-point as that section.

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