Lion farms are a major problem in parts of Africa, where the big cats are bred for petting zoos or as pets and are destroyed when they get too unruly. But in this particular lion farm, there's a more immediate problem: a lioness separated from her cubs is kept in a cage, and her captors plan to put her down, so take the bolt gun and try to inflict a fatal wound. However, the would-be executor simply stuns the animal, and when he opens the cage it jumps up and mauls him to death, quickly graduating to others around the remote property... Meanwhile, Samantha O'Hara (Megan Fox) is leading a team of mercenaries in the area to try and rescue a Governor's daughter who has been kidnapped recently. But all does not go to plan...
Director M.J. Bassett started her career as a nature photographer, and was keen to get back to that after being an action specialist on film and television more or less ever since, hence she and her daughter Isabel Bassett, who also acted in this, penned a screenplay to make it plain that the conservation message had never left her. This could have resulted in a preachy, humourless slog, where Born Free was crossed with The Wild Geese or some other variation on the action genre out of a post-colonial Britain, but actually while you were never in any doubt the movie was trying to sell you on a pro-conservation mindset, for most of it the matter of being a thriller was paramount in the production's agenda, so there were plenty of shootiebangs.
What was not quite as satisfying was how this was approached, as there were passages where that action verged on the incoherent, and the drama in between was a small step up from cliched straight to DVD efforts as the hardbitten soldiers on either side of the law go about their business of trying to kill one another. Many have issues with Megan Fox as an action heroine thanks to either her looks or her gender overall, but nobody was expecting her to give us her Lady Macbeth, and as a basic role she could have done worse. She was not really required to get into hand to hand combat, more the firearms handling, so it's not as if she was suddenly aiming to transform (so to speak) into a budding Michelle Yeoh. There were plenty who would never be convinced by her thanks to her career choices, but she didn't embarrass herself here.
It was just all a bit too dour, too keen on being taken seriously when we were dealing with an adventure featuring a man-eating CGI lioness which was like something out a comic book, and more a bid for vengeance against the animal abusers in a fictional scenario than anything accurate to the way something like this would play out in real life. The Governor's daughter (Jessica Sutton) had two pals with her, and all three were asked to be pathetic so two of them could find inner reserves of strength as the story progressed, er, apart from the whiniest who met a grim/comically callous fate not unlike in a certain Hollywood shark movie of a few years before. There were a few wacky touches, like the love for a certain Backstreet Boys hit brought up more than once, but overall Rogue was as sincere as could be, and that can turn action movie fans off, that knowledge they were being taught a lesson by what they wanted to be mindless entertainment. However for all that, and its doldrums in the middle section, this wasn't so bad. Music by Jack Halama and Scott Shields.
[Lionsgate UK presents Rogue on Digital Download 9 November and DVD 16 November.]
