Prey should not be confused with the Predator film that has the same name, the 2007 film about a family that gets hunted by a pride of lions while on holiday, or any other action or slasher movie that has that title. This Prey is about a pair of American missionaries, Andrew, played by Ryan Phillippe (Wish Upon, Cruel Intentions) and Sue, played by Mena Suvari (The Accursed, All You Need Is Blood), who are missionaries in a village in Africa.
This is Andrew’s worst day so far. He’s a doctor and lost a young kid during surgery after he expected medical supplies to arrive, but they didn’t come on time. But things become worse when he learns that he and Sue must leave quickly, there are Boko Haram fighters advancing on the village, and they are ordered to get out of there.
Meanwhile, Grun (Emile Hirsch, Son, The Darkest Hour) is getting ready to fly Tyler (Dylan Flashner, Asking For It, Hot Seat), friends of 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. No matter how questionable the plane appears, they are now desperate not to get caught and take a chance, and that chance is not a good one. The plane goes down in the Kalahari Desert wildlife preserve, which explains the original title of the film which was Kalahari. The preserve is teeming with wildlife lions, leopards, hyenas, and so on, leaving the exposed victims with extremists as well as hungry predators.
Writer/director Mukunda Michael Dewil (The Immaculate Room, Vehicle 19) then very conveniently and quite arbitrarily separates the survivors into groups of two, each group cut to kill time and focus on another group. And, rather conveniently, to have the camera elsewhere at the exact moment of the first lion attack. That cannot be a good sign.
And on this point, yes, it is not as much because very little occurs, until another lion is off the screen as we hear, if at least this one, a snakebite. For the most part, people walk around and talk too much, and then the not-so-surprising climax when it turns out that it was Hirsch’s character who was the reason for the supplies not reaching the village, he himself was busy with ivory smuggling to attend the delivery.
Sadly, most part of Prey features punch-in-the-gut hard-to-forget but absolutely unlikeable characters, and more often than not they are cigars most likely to get lighted first. Throughout the movie, even our hero who is being chased by a lion has his mouth so tightly shut one begins to assume he has no father nor god, who would protect him with mysterious forces. By the time the extremist army all three of them reached this level of denigration wanting them to kill everyone was a KFC bucket of wings.
Sadly this is still another half an hour for half-bake cliches if one may say so, like the one where you never tie up the prisoners, people who are shooting when the right time has come to sleep, grab a straw, shot, and captured the boat and now the soldier of peace is forced to kill people not save them and then all cliches are back to stand still where they were waiting for a postcard from the writers.
I assumed I’d witness some kind of animal abuse, but Nope, animals are untouchable! Pun aside, when I read that the Prey used real lions as opposed to CGI, I was at least anticipating a few Tamer animal vs stunt actor scenes. Rather, the animal attacks all occur in the background, and the big cats are nothing more than stock footage. Snakes and scorpions are the only two animals that don’t even get to share the same scene as any actor. And, yes, it is an animal attack film with no animal attacks.
Hence the result is a film that has transformed the meaning of dreary, let down, and anti-climax. Including the ending, which has no satisfaction at all, there is not even a final confrontation. Even if two of the characters are missionaries I would have thought there would at least have been a Christians vs lion showdown at some point. Rather the film crawls along to an ending that needs to be described as anti-climactic even that would be quite generous. One can see why The Barnum Picture Company is mentioned in the credits of Prey, the producers were pretty much saying that there is a sucker born every minute, and that was their audience.
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