PLOT: A big-game hunter for zoos (Nicolas Cage) books passage on a shipping freighter to transport his animals, including a rare white jaguar, only to find the ship is hauling ever deadlier cargo, a former special forces operative (Kevin Durand) gone rogue.
REVIEW: As I’ve said before, most Nicolas Cage DTV flicks can be broken down into two categories. There are the assembly line movies and the ones where he’s having fun. Typically, the latter is far more watchable than the former, with some of them, like MANDY and MOM & DAD being legitimately great movies. PRIMAL probably can’t quite be lumped in with those, but it is one of the ones where Cage is having fun, and certainly, an unpretentious B-movie that doesn’t take itself too seriously.
In fact, had PRIMAL been made fifteen or so years ago, it would have fit in nicely with some of Cage’s bigger studio movies, as the premise could have easily made for a fun Jerry Bruckheimer styled romp. Alas, the days of high concept action flicks are all but gone now, leaving the potentially fun PRIMAL to be made on a shoestring budget, a shame as clearly not enough resources were put in to do the premise justice. Instead, you have hilariously shoddy CGI animals, including a white jaguar that’s atrociously rendered, and some clumsy exterior scenes on the deck of the ship, that sport some of the worst green screen you’re likely to see outside of a student film.
Nonetheless, Cage is having a whale of a time as the broken-down big game hunter. He’s a surly, hard-drinking type very much in the mold of your classic eighties/nineties soldiers or fortune, complete with a kid sidekick (who you just know is gonna get put into danger) and an uptight love interest, in this case, Famke Janssen (in a pretty thankless part) as an army doctor helping transport the baddie. They even give him a pet parrot. Director Nick Powell clearly knows how to use his scenery-chewing star.
Kevin Durand, no stranger to scenery-chewing himself, is an inspired choice to play the baddie, with him matching Cage beat for beat in how off-kilter they both are – a must for a movie like this. You don’t want a mumbling method baddie. It’s fun watching them go head to head in a couple of close-quarters scraps, with a throwaway line about how Cage is ex-military to explain why he can hold his own so well against a special forces assassin. Michael Imperioli is the requisite suit, or rather the Burke character from ALIENS – you know the type. And then, of course, there are the macho SEAL-guys who, natch- all die in pretty short order once Durand and the jaguar get loose.
Given the budget, you shouldn't expect wall-to-wall animal maulings. The jaguar is only in a handful of scenes, and to be honest they maybe should have ditched the idea altogether as the CGI is atrociously poor. They could have kept it as a straight-up DIE HARD/ CON AIR clone, or maybe used something easier to render. Yet, it can't be denied the horrible CGI ads a certain charm to the film, although clumsy VFX aside, this isn't a badly made film – they just clearly didn't have the resources. Given what they were working with they did an ok job.
Now, I’m not saying PRIMAL is a great movie. It’s too cheaply made to ever break out the way MANDY or MOM & DAD did, but if you watch it strictly as a programmer, there’s a lot of fun to be had. If Powell and company had a couple more bucks for post-production, this would likely play a lot better than it does currently, but even in its B-grade form, it’s not a bad little action flick, and fun for Cage fans. I just wish the same plot had been done with a much bigger budget back in Cage’s A-list days because I bet if it had it would have been a campy blast.