Prey should not be mixed up or compared with the Predator film of the same title, Dick Maas’s lion gone wild in Amsterdam flick, the 2007 motion picture about a family of holiday makers who becomes prey to lions or any of the rather numerous action films and slashers that go by that name. This Prey is about American missionaries Andrew (Ryan Phillippe, Wish Upon, Cruel Intentions) & sue (Mena Suvari, The Accursed, All You Need Is Blood) who are cadre in some village in Africa.
Andrew is already in a very bad mood. He is a doctor and was assisting a young boy in surgery the expected medical equipment is not in stock however. It gets worse when he hears the news that he and Sue have to hurry away from the village; Boko haram militants are on their way there.
Meanwhile Grun (Emile Hirsch, Son, The Darkest Hour) is preparing to take Tyler (Dylan Flashner, Asking For It, Hot Seat), his friends Max (tristan Thompson, The Tutor, Mending the line) and Chrissy (Michaela Sasner, Deltopis, Natural Disasters) and their guide Thabo (Jeremy Tardy, Bone Tomahawk, Voodoo Macbeth) out of the region. They are not keen to be captured and so they take a ride on the plane, which does not look safe. And it is not safe at all. The plane goes down in a wildlife preserve in the Kalahari desert, the film’s original title was Kalahari. A preserve populated with lions, leopards, hyena etc, compelling the survivors to confront not only the extremists but also the starving predators.
Writer/Director Mukunda Michael Dewil (The Immaculate Room, Vehicle 19) quickly divides the survivors into two camps for no apparent reason other than preventing screen time wastage because they keep cutting back and forth between the two groups. And, coincidentally enough to have the camera somewhere else when the first lion attack happens. That’s not a very promising sign.
And true, it is not as much because nothing interesting happens until another lion attack takes place off screen, which we at least hear this time, and a snakebite. Primarily we see glimpses of all the chase by the crowds coupled with some noise, culminating in the not so shocking conclusion about Hirsch’s character being the one who is responsible for the delivery of the medical supplies never reaching the village, as he was occupied in ivory trade.
Sadly, unlike in other films, most of the people represented as characters in Prey are not very likable, and these characters are often the first to get killed. Even our would be hero cannot seem to get out of the moody mode that he has somehow come to lose hope in God and his plans. By the time the three supreme extremists manage to arrive, I was anticipating them to just wipe out all the characters and bring my misery to a close.
Unfortunately there is still an hour of the movie in which we have more clichés including prisoners not being restrained, people sleeping at the most critical of moments, bullets that are stray and hit their targets far better than bullets that are fired with targets in mind and a peacemaker who forgoes upholding peace for the sake of taking lives instead of saving them.
When I’d heard that the film Prey used real lions instead of CGI, I was expecting of at least some animal vs. stuntman confrontation from trained animals. Unfortunately, all the animal attacks are never shown, and the big cats are just stock footage. Aside from a snake and a scorpion, no other animals actually share a scene with any of the actors. Yes, it’s an animal attack film without an animal attack.
The end product is a film that avoids intricate plots, one that is disappointing and borderline infuriating. Even the climactic sequence is non existent as no confrontation takes place at the end. With two of the characters, being missionaries I thought that somewhere in the movie there would be a Christians vs lions showdown. Instead, the movie slowly drifts toward a resolution that is so weak it’s almost comical. It’s appropriate that The Barnum Picture Company is another name on the credit list of Prey, because the producers might have believed there’s a sucker born every minute and went out to find out that audience.
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