Given its batshit premise—big-game hunter brings deadly jungle animals aboard an ancient freighter that just also happens to be transporting an imprisoned American assassin—Primal makes for a disappointingly ordinary action flick. Frank Powell’s film revives the single-setting gimmick that was popular in the 1980s and ’90s—often referred to as “Die Hard on a _____”—without much flair or sense of escalation. Primal is essentially composed of scenes in which disposable extras wander hallways, waiting to get picked off. In the process, Powell squanders this project’s promising elements.
Most promisingly, the film’s big-game hunter, Frank Walsh, is played by Nicolas Cage, who has a famously insatiable hunger for gonzo B-movie madness. Cage plays Frank as a drunken, cigar-chomping braggart, the sort of man who feels, debatably, that he’s elevated slovenliness to a form of fashion statement. In one scene, Frank is relaxing up in a tree somewhere in a Brazilian rainforest, eating nuts, smoking a stogie, and waiting for his prey to take the bait. Here, we’re allowed to feel a loner’s solace in doing the thing he feels he was put on Earth to do. Primal could use more such moments, as Cage frequently falls back on his heightened “quotation mark” acting, in which he utters his lines in shifting and ironic cadences in a seeming effort to stay awake. Cage is such an intensely original performer that even his autopilot is pleasurable, though Frank Walsh fails to join Cage’s gallery of classic eccentrics.
More gallingly, though, Primal doesn’t capitalize on its awesomely ludicrous plot. One assumes that Frank will tangle with the assassin, Richard Loffler, who’s played by Kevin Durand in a sneering, manic key that competes with Cage’s performance for fuck-it-why-not bravado. These actors are ready to play, yet Powell and screenwriter Richard Leder keep them apart for large stretches of the film’s running time. One also assumes that a parallel will be established between Richard and the jungle animals as rhyming prey that Frank must hunt, but the animals are often forgotten and utilized only for the occasional jump scare or surprise fatality. (Perversely, Powell doesn’t even show the animals escaping their cages.)
Primal threatens to catch fire whenever it actually engages with its premise, especially in a competently staged knife fight between Frank and Richard that allows Cage and Durand to hit 11 on the machismo meter. Otherwise, Primal doesn’t live up to its name, too often suggesting an Under Siege that’s been pointlessly larded with critters from Jumanji.
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