3 stars.

Canberra's own Matthew Reilly has been an internationally best-selling author for two decades now, long having flown the coop for, literally, the life of Reilly in Los Angeles penning screenplays as well as novels.

His novels read like films - Reilly uses cinematic language and talks in interviews of the breadth of imagination a writer can throw into a literary work where a filmmaker might be curtailed by budgets into limiting the scope of the action.

He gets to put all of these ideas into practice, as well as discovering those same limitations, in this, his first foray behind the camera as a feature film director.

Interceptor launched on Netflix last week and has been sitting at the number one most viewed panel in the United States for that whole week.

As a director, Reilly is both experimental and tongue-in-cheek. The script isn't Proust and the direction isn't Kurosawa, but he doesn't pretend to be either. It's a romp, a fun action film that will kill a night on the couch.

A treasonous United States military officer, Alexander Kessel (Luke Bracey), is part of a broader international terrorist plot that has seen 16 Russian nuclear weapons stolen and aimed at targets in the United States.

Standing, possibly, between these weapons and total nuclear winter is a single platform in the Atlantic housing US interceptor missiles. The Russian terrorists have thought of this, of course, and so they've sent in Kessel to take over the facility and disable them and its staff.

Arriving in the centre of this mess is J.J. Collins (Elsa Pataky), an officer whose treatment at the hands of trolls after she blew the lid on a sexual assault by a superior officer saw her leave the service.

But here she is on this interceptor-housing platform and right in the middle of a poop-storm of gargantuan proportions.

Fortunately, this woman is thoroughly capable, and wasn't thought of in any of the meticulous planning of the terrorists.

While they have killed most of the military staff onboard, Collins takes apart their careful planning, room by room, bad guy by bad guy.

With the White House Situation Room listening closely in to their activities, can J.J. save the day?

Well, just quietly, Pataky is a Hemsworth, so yeah, she can do pretty much anything.

While her husband Chris has a sneaky little cameo audiences will love when they work it out. I don't want to detract from her own achievements here.

Pataky is on screen for most of the feature and she's a capable action hero. I particularly liked the choreography for the film's handful of fight scenes. Pataky can take and give a punch or a high kick. While I love magic realism in films, it is challenging the suspension of disbelief when a cast seem to have Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon level martial arts skills. This film is just old fashioned fisticuffs and MacGyver-level ingenuity.

Reilly, working with screenwriter Stuart Beattie, penned a screenplay that was affordable, with most of the action taking place mostly in a single set, a handful of control rooms in this rocket platform in the Atlantic Ocean.

This means a dialogue and exposition-heavy approach, and a single well-constructed set. But with so much red and blue lighting in the expensive-looking panels of the various control rooms, that it dials up the B-movie ambience, a bit Steven Segal, a bit Chuck Norris.

Is that a negative? I love those old action films.

I like Pataky as an action star too. I love that our favourite local superstar Samara Weaving has carved herself a niche in Hollywood as a horror film queen, and so perhaps this Spanish-Australian might be the next Segal or Norris.

And with those viewing figures behind Interceptor, I hope Netflix gives Reilly the kind of budget for his sophomore effort so that he might be able to take the camera out into the wider world.