Primal is a 2019 action film about a big-game hunter on a shipping freighter with a fresh haul of deadly animals from the Amazon, along with a political assassin being extradited to the U.S in secret.
In the depths of the darkest South American jungles, Frank Walsh (Nicolas Cage), a hunter who captures animals for profit, has finally snagged himself the big prize, a huge and very rare white jaguar that he knows will make him rich on the black market. About to board a boat with his collection of wild animals, he finds U.S. Marshals, including John Ringer (LaMonica Garrett) and Paul Freed (Michael Imperioli) have taken over the ship in order to transport Richard Loffler (Kevin Durand), a dangerou international terrorist with a rare medical issue that requires neurologist Dr. Ellen Taylor (Famke Janssen) to stick close by. As it happens though, once out at sea, the ship is sabotaged and in the frenzy, Loffler is able to open the animal cages and plans an escape in the chaos.
Things don’t get much more generic than director Nick Powell‘s latest thriller Primal, which strictly follows the old playbook with a kind of gleeful aplomb, doing little to make this any fun even with the addition of ferocious animals. Cage is in full Cage mode, overdoing Walsh with the same uninspired over-top-ness he’s long embraced, purposefully chewing up the scenery in hopes of recalling his glory days when that sort of thing felt fresh. However, he’s got competition in the silliness with what Durand offers as a by-the-number lunatic, who giggles and sneers incessantly, channeling every would-be psycho since Hannibal Lecter in being a stock madman. It’s the very definition of bland only because it’s about as obvious one can get in casting a bad guy in a movie like this.
Meanwhile, we do get animals, including the big white jaguar, an average made animated CGI creation that has nearly no presence, especially in sharing screen time with Cage and Durand, who have made careers of being bigger than anything else on screen. It and the other jungle beasts, including monkeys and birds end up lost in the thin mayhem as the plot doles out all the expectations one-by-one, each you can see coming on the horizon well before they arrive, leaving this most filler in delivering much entertainment.
What’s perhaps most frustrating in all this is what it might have done with the clever idea, at least one that tries to shuffle the cards a bit in a game we’ve all seen played dozens upon dozens of times before. Sure, if you’re a fan of Cage and his acting antics, which admittedly, in the right role is pure cinematic gold, this will probably have some modest satisfaction on tap. I can’t deny, there were times in this I realized I was smiling in watching him keep trying to turn up the dail even though it’s stuck at five. Famke is utterly wasted, though does what she can, and a talking parrot steals more than a few scenes itself. Primal is hardly its namesake, but at least it seems to know that.