Cast: Megan Fox, Philip Winchester, and Greg Kriek
Director: M.J. Bassett
103 minutes (15) 2020
Lions Gate DVD
[Released 16th November]
Rating: 6/10
Review by Donald Morefield
After the absurdist feline fantasy of Cats (2019), with its anthropomorphised city-street strays turned into musical protagonists by recent advancements in photo-real animation, here’s a very basic monster-movie, enhanced with visual effects for a big cat, plus soldiers-of-fortune mayhem, shot with a hectic pace and bullet-riddled fury, over many sudden and gory deaths.
Megan Fox probably got so tired of dealing with alien giant robots, in early Transformers, then hanging out with TMNT heroes for superhero satire, and far too many other, merely decorative, roles. Leading a group of mercenaries here, must have appealed, greatly, for Fox to extend her sexy stardom into action heroine. She tackles human-traffickers in the movie’s quickly tragic first sequence before a farm-raised but freed lioness begins stalker ‘n’ slasher predation during the armed rescuers’ layover night in an abandoned house.
Welcome
presence of Philip Winchester links this African actioner to TV series Strike Back (2010-8), where he played
commando Stonebridge, directed well in several episodes helmed by British filmmaker Michael
J. Bassett, explaining that connection. Bassett previously made horrors Deathwatch (2002), and Wilderness (2006), and fantasy Solomon Kane (2009), and then changed screen credits for transgender name M.J. Bassett after 2016.
It’s
easy to view this atypical ‘Megan Fox movie’ as a personal project for Bassett,
whose early interests and pursuits included wildlife photography and becoming a
veterinarian in Africa. As Rogue develops
from standard 'macho' actioner into a monster movie, where a lone lioness hunting
at night turns the nervous men into easy prey, the heroine pointedly asks some bad
guys to consider, “which bitch is gonna kill you?” Hostage girls run-around in
cat ‘n’ mouse scenes that are now so common in horror genre productions, while varied
knife-fights and shoot-outs in the burning camp are familiar as grisly bloodbaths and noisy showdowns from too many movies set in third-world war-zones.
Although
visual effects for the ‘rogue’ lioness are clearly not of premier quality, it’s
a minor fault that hardly matters when nocturnal sequences are constantly bordering
upon nightmarish surrealism. There’s also the astute presentation of rebel
females, and their fierce impacts upon the brutal containment systems of patriarchal
oppression that makes this, decidedly offbeat, star vehicle far more than just
another disposable B-movie.
