#018 - primal (2019)
hello and welcome to my weblog. today i watched primal (2019)
the critics’ consensus on rotten tomatoes notes that this movie is “chiefly of interest to nicholas cage completists” which, i mean, damn. just call me out by name, won’t you?
i invite the reader to imagine the movie “snakes on a plane” but instead of a plane, it is a tramp freighter and instead of snakes it is an albino jaguar that might also be some kind of malevolent forest ghost, an escaped former n.s.a. assassin intent on not being recaptured, some monkeys, and also some snakes. nic cage is a big game hunter and exotic animal smuggler whose chartered freighter from the amazon to mexico is commandeered by the u.s. marshalls and some other government functionaries who are trying either to extradite or rendition the former special forces assassin. when asked why they are transporting their prisoner on this freighter, it is explained that he has a neurological condition and that changes in atmospheric pressure will cause his brain to explode so they can’t put him on an airplane. sure.
as you can probably imagine, the prisoner escapes from his cage and then lets the animals out of their cages and then the boat itself becomes a sort of cage with everyone trapped inside together. the film begins killing things and breaking things and then, when there is nearly nothing left to break or kill, the movie ends. without much in the way of a plot or character depth, all this kind of movie can really do is just let things fall apart.