ROGUE (2020)

ROGUE (2020)

Tagline: When the hunter becomes the prey

(Drama, Thriller, Animal Horror) [R]

So when I saw the preview for this thing, my first thought was that Megan Fox can’t pull it off. Turns out I could not have been more wrong. 

In this one a governor's daughter is kidnapped by a group of well-armed poachers and man, that public official is full blown rich, so he’s gonna hire a team of mercenaries to go find her (but just leave her classmates, because they are poor or whatever). Instead of just the governor's daughter, the mercenaries find 3 girls and a heck of a lot of trouble. The men that took her have far more bad guys than the mercenaries are prepared for. The whole job goes south and while on the run, they are now being hunted by both a lion that kills on sight, and like I said…we’ve got an endless horde of bad guys. 

First off Megan Fox plays Samantha O’Hara in this flick and O’Hara leads the group of mercenaries and in spite of some of the crazy critical reviews on the movie, she is actually a bright spot. She definitely shows a LOT more range here than I thought she had. There are even a few scenes that would make BLACK WIDOW take notice, especially towards the final act. Philip Winchester plays Kasinski who turns out to be a really likable character in the film. His performance is very solid as is just about everyone in this thing. I will say probably the weakest performances are given by some of the poachers who seems to have just been hired to say a few lines and get shot. One bit of interesting casting is that Isabel Bassett gets a pretty big role, she was last seen as a witch in 2009’s SOLOMON KAINE. She has no other acting roles between then and this one. 

The levity of this movie is a lot more serious than the previews might make you think. The villains are extremely evil and you want them taken down. You feel for the mercenaries and the odds they are facing. I will say if you are in for a total nonsense fluff military-style movie, this one is not it. There is some dark crap in this thing, so just know that upfront. There is also just a ton of cussing, so keep that in mind as well. 

Where things get rough for this movie are the impractical ways the mercenaries take on the poachers in the opening scenes. It seems like if you were going to have a cut-and-run extraction style mission you would at least disable the bad guys' vehicles upfront. I know nothing about this kind of work, but that would have been my first thought. They don’t do that here and that is a huge problem. The other is that they completely underestimated who they were up against. 

The other issue is the CGI. I am not sure exactly when “EVERYTHING” seemed to have to be CGI in low budget movies, but you couldn’t get 1 trained lion or at least a decent special effects team? This thing looks pretty weak even if it was going straight to the SYFY channel. 

I know a lot of people are beating this thing up. Not me. I was impressed with the seriousness of the subject the film decided to take on and the ability of the scriptwriters to inject a bit of actual storytelling and slight humor into a pretty dark movie.

I am going to give it a 4 out of 7. For me, this is something I might watch once every 5 years and definitely won’t be buying. Not because there are not a lot of quality things about it, but because of the subject matter and things that the film crew decided to bring to light are for me, less “entertainment” and more documentary film fare. This is not to say the film's final message isn't important, it is. 

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