In “The Divide,’’ a handful of strangers flee into a fallout shelter after a nuclear attack. They all live in the same New York high-rise. Their host is the building super (Michael Biehn), who’s taken it upon himself to turn his basement dwelling into a bunker. Eventually, the sitting and wondering about exposure to radiation starts to make the men do increasingly crazy things such as turn one of the women into their sex slave. It’s doom that we’re meant to feel here. And repulsion. I hate to say, but I shrugged.
The director Xavier Gens knows how to draw a bloodbath. He did as much with his previous films - the Hollywood shoot-em-up “Hitman’’ and a grisly but not stupid French cannibalism slog called “Frontier(s).’’ The tub here doesn’t overflow. That should be a mercy, but you can sense that Gens, a Frenchman, is stuck with a script - by Karl Mueller and Eron Sheean - that simply won’t let him take the beatings and assaults and ax-wielding as far over the top as he might like to go. What you’re left with is a movie increasingly occupied by bad boys - played by Milo Ventimiglia and Ashton Holmes - and the gradual heroine (Lauren German), a pretty woman not-so-innocently named Eva.
