It was all supposed to go like clockwork.
They were taking a crack team of mercenaries into a small Al-Shabaab militia camp, grabbing one girl the human traffickers had imprisoned, then slipping away. If it went well, they could get in and out without the bad guys even knowing they were there.
At least that’s how merc boss Samantha O’Hara had planned it. Of course, the clock don’t always work like it should:
The informer who gave them the layout of the camp was wrong.
There were three girls in cages instead of one.
The mercs were spotted and a gun battle broke out.
The militia blasted their extraction helicopter right out of the sky.
And those of their number still alive had to jump off a cliff into a raging river.
Sam had been through worse screwups, but not many.
To top it all off they had no radio to call for help. And the only shelter they could find by nightfall was what looked like an abandoned lion farm. It was one of those places that raised caged animals to use for rich hunters from America and the like. And this place looked like things had gone terribly wrong at some point. There were dead bodies. Lots of blood.
But they had to stay there and bandage their wounds, at least for the night. Besides, the teens they rescued were worse for wear and couldn’t keep going.
When Sam heard the first lion roar and the first man scream, however, she knew it was going to be a long, hard and dangerously dark 12 hours.
You could say that the mercenaries fight hard to save the teen girls and each other. And that would be true. But we’re repeatedly reminded that they’re there for the paycheck. That said, Sam puts her life on the line several times to save the teens.
The leader of the Al-Shabaab militia group orders his men to swarm a group of merc survivors saying, “Remember, the girl lives! Everyone else, do as Allah commands.”
It’s implied that the teen girl captives were sexually trafficked and abused, and one girl raises the back of her shirt to reveal bruises and cuts. But we don’t see the actual abuse take place.
The killer lion is obviously a CGI construct. And the rendered image is really quite poor at times. That said, the bloody aftereffects of its many attacks appear much more realistic. We see the lashed and torn open skin of multiple men who have had their throats ripped open and their heads, arms and chests lacerated by sharp claws. Blood splashes liberally on walls and the ground. A young girl is also grabbed and torn apart by a huge alligator. The actual attack whips the camera back and forth and is hard to see, but the bodily remains are left in a soup of water and blood.
The gun battles are nearly as prolific as the animal attacks. Men and women get gunned down and felled by viciously splattering headshots. Two different men are killed with execution-style gunshots to their forehead (with one being depicted as is something of a mercy killing). A woman attacks two men with a knife—efficiently and savagely stabbing them at key points on their neck and upper body. Two men have a knife fight, and one has his arm vividly impaled by the opponent’s large blade. Several huge explosions rock a couple different battles. And a helicopter is hit with an RPG that blows the aircraft into fiery chunks.
At the lion farm we see corpses of slain men. And we also see the skins of lions hanging from the rafters, as well as the bloody tusks and bones of animals that were intended for sale.
A teen girl is hit in the face and knocked to the ground. And another is roughly grabbed and dragged around before she latches onto a heavy metal wrench and beats her captor to death (his spouting blood spattering her chest and face). A man talks of being forced to watch his family murdered. (He’s later praised for fulfilling his bloody revenge.)
To reinforce the protagonists’ sense of their mercenary toughness, the film has Sam and her crew drop a lot of f-bombs. More than 100 f-words and some 20 s-words join several uses each of “a–hole” and “d–khead.” Jesus’ and God’s names are misused three times total.
A very badly wounded man is given a morphine lollipop. One of the mercs sips regularly from a small flask. And he states that his only fear is running out of booze and growing sober. We see another man from a distance with an open bottle of alcohol in his hand. One room in the abandoned lion farm shows a number of empty liquor bottles sitting on a table.
We hear some sarcastic racial quips made about a Chinese mercenary.
Rogue is supposed to be something of a reboot of the Predator film concept, only with a bloodthirsty lion and human traffickers as the villains, and a femme fatale gunslinger as the hero.
But in reality, this is just a very bad movie.
Accepting that body-armor clad Megan Fox is a scarred and tough-as-rusted-plate-mail mercenary is just about as difficult as believing this pic’s horribly rendered CGI lion. And the scripted action and interactions with Al-Shabaab militia are all completely ridiculous.
The truth of it is, this is really a message movie of sorts: It’s designed to point out the travesty of lion farms that raise and kill off thousands of lions for profit and sport. The director includes a written commentary at movie’s end and even incorporates character dialogue that states that “it’s justice” if a rogue lion kills people in light of all the wrongs humanity has wrought against such animals.
Of course, to get to that point you have to sit through scores of men and some teen girls being beaten, ripped open or riddled with bullets. And you’re pummeled with as much foul profanity as the screen is splashed in stage blood and gore.
Frankly, it probably would have been better if they had just skipped to the director’s written message and added a nice underscore and some African snapshots. Maybe Megan Fox could have even done one of those tear-jerking celebrity PSAs.
It would have been easier on the eyes.
And more entertaining.
After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.
