This Black Ops team has been called to this Eastern European warzone, where their instructions are to execute as many of the insurgents as possible, which they have been doing fairly successfully up until now. That is until they ambush a small cell of armoured vehicles and their crew - the rebels all die, but on investigation to see the prisoners they have, the orders are to kill them as well, which Kia Clarke (Samantha Schnitzler) for one is deeply unhappy about. She is about to refuse when her team leader points his gun at her and demands she shoot one prisoner who has just bitten off the top of a colleague's finger in retaliation, so Kia has no alternative but to comply. Little does she or the Black Ops team know that they have just set in motion something supernatural...
Joining what seemed like about a million British low budget horror movies in the twenty-first century, few of which made the impact their creators might have desired, director Tom Paton's The Ascent was originally called Stairs, which was a more accurate term for what the characters encounter than the alternate title which tried to make the unwary viewer think of the cult favourite The Descent. In other territories it was called simply Black Ops, and this confusion of names was appropriate seeing as how its main inspiration appeared to be the Tom Cruise flop Edge of Tomorrow, which also had title trouble when the studio could not settle on what to term it and ended up with the vaguest one possible which they then tried to dial back, with mixed results.
No such issues here, the stakes were lower when the budget was lower, though it did look as if an uncertainty was affecting the project, one like Edge of Tomorrow was very repetitive, though in this case it was as much a method to keep costs down and reuse footage over and over instead of capturing more and more of it. The consequences of this were not as suspenseful as you imagine the makers would have liked, indeed it quickly began to test the patience because, as with the Cruise effort, you didn't feel as if you were getting anywhere, and doing it extremely slowly. Unlike the Cruise movie, this did not pick up a cult following thanks to the star's reputation for action thrillers preceding him, for here the biggest star was talent show singer turned soap opera actor Shayne Ward. Good on him for making a career for himself, but he wasn't Tom Cruise.
Some would say that was a good thing, too, but the characters here, certainly the Black Ops ones, were largely interchangeable, and in that manner disposable as well. Paton had a go at making this visually interesting by essentially making it in black and white, or rather black and blue, black and red and black and green. It was a brave try at smuggling in a monochrome movie to an audience who wouldn't dream of watching a black and white oldie, but again he did not quite do enough with it, and a monotony set into the image and the plot early on that refused to lift. Not helping was that these soldiers had already been established as unlikeable by their murderous actions early on, even the ones pressured to kill, so you were not too bothered that they started infighting and being bumped off by the central gimmick, a flight of stairs. That's right, they ended up in a mystical stairwell that went on forever with only a magical emergency exit to the recent past to break up that repetition (but didn't). Mentioning Back to the Future Part II wasn't fooling anyone, this was a Cube rip-off at heart, packed with lazy swearing and not innovative enough to stand on its own. Music by Max Sweiry.
