My quick rating – 3.7/10. The Grove kicks off with what sounds suspiciously like a future plot point screaming for attention, a blaring alarm that practically winks at the audience and says, “See you in Act II.” From there, we jump straight into a Black Ops super-soldier experiment because, of course, we do. Terrance (Acoryé White) volunteers for a miracle serum that’s supposed to give him and his fiancée, Alice (Psalms) a better life. Instead, it gives him feral madness the second he stops taking his meds. If the goal was “Captain America, but make it tragic,” the movie somehow heard “Captain America, but make it Dollar Tree.”
Once Terrance comes home, the film decides it needs a boost – so it tosses in a cluster of influencers, hopefully to pump up the body count. These geniuses can’t tell the difference between a cocktail with 151 rum and one without, which says everything you need to know about their survival prospects. Meanwhile, a Snake Eyes-looking soldier named Omega (Ethan Melisano) stalks around with orders that have shifted from “capture” to “sanitize,” though the movie barely explains why. Not that it matters, you can’t see half of what’s going on anyway. The forest massacre sequence is so dark it might as well be a podcast.
The writing doesn’t do the cast any favors. Every character is one note, and that one note is “annoying.” The dialogue is a rotating door of eye-roll moments. And honestly, why even mess with a super-soldier serum when you can slap a suit on someone that gives them teleportation, hyperspeed, and super strength? If that tech exists, the serum should be in the trash next to the first draft of this script.
Acoryé White pulls triple duty here – actor, director, writer – and while ambition is admirable, the movie feels like a rough draft that escaped too early. There are odd time jumps with zero transition, scenes that cut away before you can process what happened, and action that looks like they shot partial takes and stitched them together with the editing equivalent of duct tape. The audio problems don’t help either; even after some cleanup, the volume fluctuates like someone kept leaning on the mixer.
Then comes the ending, an abrupt “To Be Continued” that lands like a budget version of a Marvel stinger nobody asked for. There might be a good movie buried somewhere in White’s head, but it hasn’t fully made it to the screen yet. With a stronger team and fewer hats on one person, Part 2 could be something. The Grove just isn’t it.
