The last time Charlize Theron turned up in a prestige picture, she was nominated for the third Academy Award of her career. Perhaps even more impressive than this feat: She was nominated for playing Megyn Kelly, a pretty unlikable person, in Bombshell, a pretty terrible movie that frames the shameless outrage-monger Kelly as a hard-bitten journalist eventually uniting with other women to stand up for what’s right. That’s not to say she deserved the sexual harassment she experienced from former Fox News honcho Roger Ailes, of course, but as time has gone on, the movie’s failure to interrogate the character further than a vaguely conservative journalist of utmost integrity looks all the more simplistic.

It’s hard to tell whether Theron regrets Bombshell despite the awards attention it received, has been searching in vain for another awards-friendly project but coming up empty, or simply doesn’t feel the need to make more of the issue pictures that shaped her post-Monster career, with projects like North Country (also about sexual harassment), In the Valley of Elah (PTSD), and Tully (the difficulties of contemporary motherhood). Whatever the reason, Theron’s 2020s career has more in common with the 2005 movie she released around the same as her Oscar-nominated performance in North Country: Aeon Flux, an ill-fated sci-fi action-adventure. Her projects have included The Old Guard and its sequel, two Fast & Furious installments, and now Apex, a movie where she must fight her way through a pitched battle with both nature and a determined stalker.

Compared to Theron’s other recent films, and despite its Netflix origins, Apex may actually count as a 2020s equivalent of a prestige picture – and it’s telling that this could be said, even half in jest, about a movie that is essentially a variation on the Sylvester Stallone vehicle Cliffhanger. Theron plays Sasha, an extreme-activities enthusiast whose partner’s fate seems clear from the movie’s earliest moments, even if he’s played by Eric Bana. While attempting to scale the Troll Wall in Norway, Tommy (Bana) plummets to his death, a fate made more gruesome by the fact that Sasha must cut him loose, not knowing if he’s dead or just unconscious, before his harness pulls her down with him. Months later, on a solo trip into the Australian wilderness, she encounters Ben (Taron Egerton), whose outdoor hobbies make hers look incredibly grounded by comparison.

The same goes for Egerton’s bad guy performance, even if he doesn’t ultimately scale over the top of Troll Wall-level heights. Not that Theron particularly needs someone else to make her look grounded; in a way, her action-movie vibe throws back to the grimacing heroes of ’80s-era action, with less over-the-top guns-blazing movies surrounding her. It’s a persona she returned to a decade after Aeon Flux, with a movie that, appropriately enough, sequelized an ’80s film series: Mad Max: Fury Road, where her Furiosa character shared the spotlight with Tom Hardy’s recast Max and performs more of the film’s steeliness and its emotional lifting (despite her clashes with Hardy on set). There was also an ’80s connection with the late-Cold-War-set Atomic Blonde, which kept her on-trend with the high-style John Wick-ification of action. For that matter, the Fast & Furious series that she jumped on with part eight owes something to that decade, too, given Vin Diesel’s status as a contemporary version of Stallone.

Apex moves her action heroics into the ’90s by evoking both Cliffhanger and The River Wild.  This is Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur’s fourth English-language survival thriller so far (he made at least one Icelandic one, as well), and he’s gotten exceedingly good at balancing pulpy sensationalism with genuine respect at the world’s natural beauty (and horrors of its wrath). While Egerton gets to act a little loopy as Ben, Theron is dead serious for pretty much every minute that she’s on screen here. It’s part of her action persona; as acidly funny as she’s been in movies like Young Adult and Tully, her Fast & Furious movies are the only actioners she does with a hint of dry sarcasm. There’s never an Arnold-style quip to punctuate her acts of violence. She’s ruthlessly efficient, which is why she makes sense as a well-trained, quick-thinking, bold-acting survivor in Apex. Her obligatory vulnerability is meted out with a series of sad looks into the middle distance, plus one somewhat distended monologue where she recounts her tragic backstory to Ben. (They’re tethered together; it’s a long story.)

It’s a curious scene, because it seems poised for a revelation but actually just features Theron telling the audience what we already saw, and what the actress already communicated, during the scene in question. Seeing her recap it in the dead of blue-lit night (recalling the lighting from a particularly memorable Fury Road sequence) doesn’t add much to her performance – in part because Theron never lacks for emotional clarity beneath her firm, physical determination. Though she’s been good in plenty of types of movies – Young Adult and Tully, in particular, should have added to her Oscar nomination tally – her action performances don’t feel like popcorn vacations. She’s legitimately more effective and memorable in Apex, Mad Max: Fury Road, and Atomic Blonde than she is in Bombshell.

Her action performances often mirror her relationship with her unavoidable beauty, which she famously hid behind makeup to win that Oscar for Monster. Since then, she’s sometimes used her pristine looks for composed menace (as the villainous queen in two Snow White-themed dark-fairy-tale movies) or traditional Hollywood means (the camera-ready candidate of Long Shot). Most often, though, she likes to show the work that goes into her physicality: the ice bath of Atomic Blonde, the elaborate and sometimes punishing beauty rituals of Young Adult offering a peek behind the curtain as a woman approaches middle age, and the eventually visible toll of her ordeal in Apex. In that sense, she does her ’80s male equivalents one better. Stallone in particular has frustrated some fans for choosing action shlock over more movies like Rocky or Copland. Theron, on the other hand, works hard to erase the line between action star and just plain actor.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.

Stream Apex on Netflix