Stowaway streams exclusively on AMC+ beginning August 5.
Declan Whitebloom’s feature debut brings the ambitious casting of Ruby Rose and Frank Grillo in Stowaway, a Die Hard-meets-Panic Room-on-a-boat thriller that centers on a party girl named Belle (Rose) who one day gets a phone call from a man named Meeser (Grillo), informing her of her father’s passing. Despite her own personal feelings about her father, she sets down to Mississippi to begrudgingly accept the assets he’s left her in his will, which is comprised of a large yacht.
After meeting a barhop named Michael (Patrick Schwarzenegger), the two settled down for a trist. Little does Belle or her suitor know that her father’s yacht is about to become a battleground for survival when three men trespass onto the yacht with the intent of breaking into a secret safe and acquiring its alleged contents of $80 million dollars. Violence ensues and leaves Bella on her own, fighting covertly for her life against the armed men while searching for answers about the break-in, all pointing to a number of secrets about her father that she would never realize, including who his real enemies were until his untimely death.
At a runtime of eighty-four minutes and with a strong lead in Rose and the casting of Grillo, a film like Stowaway would be the kind to guarantee a more robust thriller for its duration. Bella’s story begins with a vingette of her childhood when she nearly dies from drowning, and later fast forwards into her teens where living on the edge eventually finds her landing in jail before jumping some years ahead into the film’s present day setting. She’s got a mild case of thalassophobia, which makes her reluctance to accept the yacht pretty sound at first.
Less so, to be honest, is the length to which the film’s story is stretched out that it feels like an overlong compensation for the film’s lack of substance. The film doesn’t have too many moving pieces, which should have made it easier to tell a more taut, concrete thriller. Instead, it’s a story with a few moments that feel like contrivances to help make the film longer than it needs to be at times. There’s one scene where Rose goes toe-to-toe with one of the mercenaries, and it ends up going in a different direction than the viewer might expect.
The good news here is that this scene ultimately solidifies the film’s ending where we meet a mother and daughter as it pertains to the secrets of Bella’s father. It also helps that Grillo brings his A-game to a limited screen role opposite Rose. Unfortunately, that’s all the film really has to go by, additionally when accounting for its few twists and turns. There’s at least one scene where you get the sense that the film either tries too hard to be suspenseful or where our protagonist could have done something to end her nightmare sooner, and is the film has it, that’s simply not the case.
Barring a few other visual flaws and less-than-desireable CG, Stowaway might otherwise be a fun, contained action thriller, one that obviously sells Rose as an action star here. You might have better luck with some of her other recent work, depending on your tastes, although you’re welcome to give Stowaway a shot. Just don’t expect it to be a total thrillride.