Cage against the meow-chine.

If there's one thing in this life you can count on, it's that nowadays if a movie has Nic Cage in it there's roughly around a 90% chance that movie is going to be absolutely bat-shit. There's also an unfairly high percentage chance it's going straight to DVD without even bothering a box office, but that my friends is just the sorry state of the industry.

There are exceptions to this rule of course; Color out of Space is currently straining retinas on giant screens across the  ountry and seems like it's a good shout if you like bizarre cosmic horror shrouded in the kind of colour scheme you're much more likely to encounter in the make up bag of your average cosplayer than at a cinema. Can't wait. Sadly there are the other exceptions, where there exists a premise so utterly bonkers that they couldn't possibly live up to the hype, even if they genetically engineered a unicorn to shatter into a million tiny shards of brightly coloured glitter if so much as looked at funny. I mean, you're going to watch them try, but you're going to be disappointed. Thankfully, the latter is the much less commonly occurring, although that does make it all the more falling when it happens.

Falling into that category like the lumpen mess that it is, is the initially promising yet maddeningly pedestrian Primal. For those of you out there unaware even of its existence, allow me to give you the elevator pitch; in washed but washed up hunter captures a very CG white Jaguar to sell to a Mexican zoo but his boat back from whatever clichéd South America jungle he had deposited himself in is shanghai'd by the NSA to transport a traitorous US assassin turned rogue because he has a brain condition that will kill him if he flies. Still with us? So far so nutty.

Honestly, the premise of this movie could barely have any more potential for both disaster and brilliance. Of course the slightly unhinged assassin gets out. Of course he lets a bunch of animals, include the big cat out. Of course it ends up being a big stupid game of hide and seek with added guns and predatory jungle beasts. Except...

It delivers roughly none of all that. 

Kevin Durand is stuck in some sort of childlike impersonation of Hannibal Lector with none of the effortless menace and for a trained assassin is particularly adapt at killing extras but has a distinct targeting blind spot for anyone you might recognise as having acted previously (roughly three of the cast). He also seems to suffer from tremendous swings in his motivation; he can't decide whether to kill Nic Cage and keeps flip flopping even when it makes no sense at all to keep trying to confront him, given that his overall plan is just to not go to Puerto Rico. Hardly diabolical at all really.

Where the disappointment really sinks its teeth in is with the aforementioned jaguar. Although I'm sure pure white jaguars are genetically possible, they certainly didn't rope one in (or bleach a regular, non-albino one) so we get what is for the most part fairly palettable, mostly functional but occasionally dumb looking CG cat. The really crime is not against pixels but more that the much vaunted genetically anomalous killing machine is in the movie for about 2 minutes, tops. Whether this is because the couldn't afford the renders for any more is unsubstantiated, but the bottom line is that the only animals loose are some territorial monkeys, a random venomous snake that bites someone so inconsequential that I struggled to work out who they were and a jaguar that seems content to just keep to himself while all the stupid humans wander round the boat taking pot shots at one another until he's required for some deus ex machina at the end.

Ultimately, it's a tale of "could've beens". This could have been an odd take on the Snakes on a Plane concept with the boat crew despearate running around trying to avoid being bitten, mauled or shot by something or someone at every corner. They could have gone with the Deep Blue Sea vibe, our plucky heroes being chased round a boat belt an intelligent apex predator whilst trying to not get shot. Or they could have gone full Nic Cage and had him swap his face with the jaguar in order to infiltrate a notorious gang of drug dealers who killed his son. OK, maybe not that last one. My point is, for what is probably marketed as an action thriller, there's a stark dearth of thrills. Snakebite guy, for example, is dying in front of his own teenage son for the better part of the movie because there's no anti-venom and gets a less than 20% chance of surviving. He gets wheeled into an ambulance at the end look less than spritely but still ticking for no discernable reason. No drama results from his brush with a danger noodle (a Bushmaster we're reliably informed) so waht exactly is the point? The NSA agents are mostly anonymous, used only for bullet fodder or actually fodder but at no point do they come across as anything but obnoxious picks so literally nobody cares. It took me about 10 minutes to recognise Famke Jansen because for some reason she looked like she'd swallowed a bee.

All in all, pretty disappointed. After the trailer teased us with such undisputed script gems as "you kill my cat and I'll blow your head off", you have to go all out in the movie, but unfortunately, it never made it out of first gear. Shame.