PREY! (2024) 

Written and Directed by Mukunda Michael Dewil

Review by: Mark Walker

A young couple is compelled to leave their Christian missionary station in the Kalahari Desert after being threatened with death by an extremist militant gang. After crashing their aircraft they must battle man and beast for their lives. (IMDB)

Please note – there are spoilers for PREY! in this review.

There’s a synopsis I can get behind. Not particularly original, and the typeface on the poster made me immediately think of BEAST (2022) but originality can be overrated, especially when there is a chance for some lions chowing down on hapless crash victims.

PREY! starts well and I was invested quite early on. The threat of kidnap for missionaries Andrew (Ryan Philippe) and Sue (Mena Suvari) forces them to charter seats on a dodgy looking airplane, piloted by the even dodgier-looking Emile Hirsch as Grun, the very definition of “guy with a shady past”. They are joined by the usual selection of expendable rich kids and their African guide.

And yep, the plane goes down.

In the middle of a game reserve populated by man-eating lions and a few hyenas.

It’s The Grey, only with Lions and the sweltering heat, instead of wolves and freezing snow.

Regardless of the comparisons. it’s a great set-up and it gets into the action really quickly. With a story like this you just want to see your characters stranded and then fighting for their lives, and it doesn’t take long. It also doesn’t take long for the film to kill off its only two female characters (yep, sorry, spoilers) one of whom I am not sure even gets any lines. 

And the men don’t fare any better, which is to be expected – you don’t go into a film like this expecting everyone to survive, but many of the deaths seem to come about from such daft decisions and behaviour, you wonder whether any of them deserved to have survived long enough in life to even make it to the plane in the first place. Perhaps if they had saved at least one of the women, there might have been someone with some brains on the team? Although, judging by Andrew and Sue’s blind faith that God will stop hungry lions, maybe not?

As the story unfolds, so the movie unravels. More ridiculous decisions and behaviour push this close to becoming a comedy at times. 

Caught by militant fighters, the remaining survivors simply wait for them to fall sleep in the harsh African sun, despite the fact they are hardened soldiers and the survivors have been without much food and water for a couple of days. Once they overpower the soldiers, the survivors head off on a treacherous walk to civilisation, through maneater territory… and leave the soldiers’ weapons behind…

Hiding on top of some rocks, as the lions stalk them, one of the characters finds a scorpion climbing on their shoulder. Instead of flicking it off, he watches it wander down his arm, over his hand (perfect time to fling it behind him), over his companion’s chest, onto his face, round his neck and onto his cheek before swatting it away, just so he can also knock a stone down the rocks to, whoops, attract the lions…

And the rocks they are hiding on? Vasquez Rocks in California! I know they are cool, but they are also famous and that really took me out of the film as I was then just thinking about Gorns and Bill and Ted. I appreciate this would have had a low budget (the stock images of lions attesting to that fact) so location filming in Africa was likely out, but why use something so famous and recognisable? If only the poor guys had known how close to LA they were?

PREY! toys with themes around faith and redemption but doesn’t quite pull them off. Hirsch’s character does have a kind of arc, but it is handled clumsily with Grun blatantly telling the audience he is going to do something right for once in his life, just before making another pretty stupid decision. While Andrew and Sue are all about faith, it doesn’t do Sue any good and the one sign that Andrew’s faith might be rewarded actually made me laugh out loud. 

As the movie drew to a close, I was PREY!ing for a THE GREY style face-off with the hyenas that take over from the lions. The film could have redeemed itself at that point, but it didn’t, and it went literal Deus Ex Machina, which was a real kick in the teeth for Sue; maybe she just didn’t have enough faith when her time had come. Or perhaps God doesn’t like women? If this is a film about faith, then the message is muddled.

I just needed more Liam Neeson-style Hyena punching.

PREY! is a hard film to recommend. I wanted to like it, it sounded right up my street; but I found it derivative, the acting isn’t great (you see more scenery being chewed here than people) and the story just gets more and more laughable as it goes on. However, it is shot well and there are some nice-looking landscape views and a sense of scale, despite the low budget. The movie portrays the heat of the reserve and the desperateness of the survivors’ situation really well. Despite the lack of interaction between the actors and the lions (all the deaths occur offscreen) for the low budget, the director and cinematographer have done a good job. 

However, even after all that, there is something about it that I did like. I would probably never watch it again but, for a Friday night giggle after a few drinks, you could do a lot worse and I would guarantee that, although it is not the greatest film you will ever see, you’ll probably enjoy it. Maybe not for the right reasons but at 86 minutes, what have you got to lose? Well about 80 minutes if you take out the credits, but you know what I mean.

Prey! is available on Digital Platforms and DVD 29 April. Distributed by Signature Entertainment