'Radioflash'

The apocalyptic thriller “Radioflash” is a road movie that meanders an exasperatingly long time before figuring out where it’s going — and, by then, a viewer has ceased to care.

Reese (Brighton Sharbino) is a teen who applies her considerable brainpower to solving complex puzzles in virtual reality. Writer-director Ben McPherson begins with Reese engaged in such a problem, in a room with dial telephones covering the walls and water rapidly rising. This makes for a visually striking image, and has dog-all to do with the rest of the movie.

One day, an electromagnetic pulse — or radioflash — zaps across the western United States, leaving everything that was plugged in, including the electrical grid, completely inoperative. Reese’s cellphone and tablet still work, but there’s no internet with which they can connect. Her dad (Dominic Monaghan, from “Lost”) thinks they can ride things out until all returns to normal, but Reese sees her neighbors’ mounting anxiety and believes they need to escape the city. (The city in this case is Spokane, Wash., and the movie was filmed there and parts of Idaho and Montana.)

Hooking a car battery to the ham radio in the shed, Reese makes contact with her survivalist grandfather (Will Patton), who says he has a safe haven if he and her dad can get there. That turns out to be not so simple for this Little Red Riding Hood, because there are wolves of all kinds between her and Grandpa’s house.

Reese’s perils on the road would make for a tight little thriller, but getting her to the point where she’s using her problem-solving skills to save herself takes an infuriating amount of time. The pacing feels sluggish in some places, and jumpy in others, which doesn’t give Sharbino’s Reese an honest chance to earn her action-hero conclusion.

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‘Radioflash’

★★

Opens Friday, November 15, in area theaters. Not rated, but probably PG-13 for violence and language. Running time: 95 minutes.