Prey

There’s a school of thought that believes Hollywood’s mod­ern predilec­tion for always chas­ing the big mon­ey has been at the expense of tight lit­tle genre b‑movies or mid-bud­get, adult-ori­ent­ed fare. Now, with stream­ing a cul­tur­al­ly dom­i­nant force, the jus­ti­fi­ca­tion has been found to pony up for those small­er, more per­son­al projects. Yet at the same time, there’s also a sense of ​“wel­come to the waste­land” for those films that have been deemed unwor­thy of even a small cin­e­ma run-out.

Meet Dan Trachtenberg’s Prey, which offers up an intrigu­ing case study in that its mod­est scope and sto­ry aims make it come across as one of those movies that, in days of yore, you’d watch as a bit of fluffy filler in advance of the main event. It’s also a spin-off from the Preda­tor movie fran­chise, imag­in­ing a sce­nario in which the inter­galac­tic dread­locked limb-lop­per sidle up to Earth for a lit­tle chop-chop action in the ear­ly 18^th cen­tu­ry, right when the native Comanche pop­u­la­tion are on the cusp of being dec­i­mat­ed by colo­nial oppres­sors from Europe.

So Prey has the fran­chise affil­i­a­tion, and it also works as a tidy stand-alone project – the only back­sto­ry you need to know is that the Preda­tor wants noth­ing more than to mur­der you. For such a scaled-back and rus­tic pro­duc­tion, it works on a visu­al lev­el, even if there’s lit­tle more to the land­scape than sad look­ing trees and vast stretch­es of blue-grey scrub­land. It’s an open play­ing field and, as with John McTiernan’s 1988 orig­i­nal, the film makes a fine fist of chan­nelling the eerie claus­tro­pho­bia that comes when wan­der­ing the great outdoors.

Our hero is Amber Midthun­der Naru, with her warpaint, hatch­et-on-a-rope and trusty mutt, des­per­ate to be accept­ed among the male hunter-gath­er­ers of the tribe, but prone to muff­ing it at the cru­cial moment. Yet, her mox­ie and inge­nu­ity pro­vide Pred­dy-boy with his only real phys­i­cal match, and their final stand-off arrives after much sub­sidiary blood­let­ting, all of which is fair­ly routine.

The film plays through the sce­nario with plen­ty of moment-by-moment gus­to, and there’s a lack of flab to it that makes it rather appeal­ing when placed next to so many action block­busters (many of the inter­im Preda­tor fran­chise entries includ­ed) that just feel the need to ramp things up to a sil­ly degree. And still, this is a shal­low film that offers lit­tle more than super­fi­cial plea­sures. There’s no psy­cho­log­i­cal ele­ment, it’s not about any­thing and, despite Midthunder’s appeal­ing cen­tral turn, there’s pre­cious lit­tle to lodge in the mem­o­ry after cred­its have rolled.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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