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PRIMAL
Director: Nick Powell Cast: Nicolas Cage, Famke Janssen, Kevin Durand, LaMonica Garrett, Michael Imperioli MPAA
Rating: Running Time: 1:37 Release Date: 11/8/19 (limited) |
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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 7, 2019 When it comes to ridiculous premises for B-movies, there really are only two modes: enough or too much. Here's one for you, which is partly the foundational setup of Primal: A bunch of wild animals, including a man-eating jaguar, are let loose on a ship in the middle of the sea. The only hope to contain the animals is Frank Walsh (Nicolas Cage), a misanthropic hunter who cares more about the lives of the animals, because of the money they can bring to him, than the lives of the passengers and crew. That's enough—maybe even more than enough. Here, though, is the other part of the movie's premise: A military-trained assassin, who has been detained for war crimes, is also on the ship, and he, too, is on the loose. The only hope for the passengers and crew is a team of government agents, who have been ordered to capture the prisoner alive—no matter, it seems, the casualties. Richard Leder's screenplay jams these two conceits together, whether or not it makes much sense. While Leder and director Nick Powell have no greater ambitions than to make a ridiculous B-movie about the simultaneous hunts for killer animals and a murderous man on a ship in the middle of the ocean, they have overestimated how much we're willing accept for that goal. The movie is, to put it simply, too much. Any kind of plot summary is pointless beyond the movie's double premise, but in addition to Frank (played by Cage with some of his trademarked wildness—but not enough to convince us of the joke), there's also a bunch of other people on the ship who argue about what to do with the animals and Richard Loffler (Kevin Durand), the escaped assassin. To describe the characters is also pretty useless, because they're either fodder (for either the animals or the killer) or, well, useless in the hunt (Two characters, on two separate occasions, don't escape being held hostage, despite the distraction of a gunfight). The story moves from fistfight to shootout, with the occasional mauling or threat of a venomous snake, amidst the murky backdrop of the ship's rooms and corridors. The overly simplistic execution of this ludicrous mishmash of ideas might be the biggest problem with Primal. Something this inherently silly shouldn't feel so tediously routine. Copyright © 2019 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved. |
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