Maybe the prospects for a mercenaries vs. wild lion starring Megan Fox were pretty low in my estimation, so being vaguely competent felt pretty substantial and exceptional... Yeah, this wasn’t good, but it was better than I expected.
Somber and sober are on the edges and at the core of this seemingly trivial premise. It wraps its action in a point, highlighting poaching, lion farms, political corruption, mercenary dilemma, white slavery, and child soldiers. Some of it is heavy handed, like some of the add-on soliloquies, but I appreciate that it at least had a point in between the raw raging revenge and the bountiful bullet bloodshed. It may not have been eloquent, but it did endeavor.
The action is alright. Pretty much what you might expect, for it packed it in constantly.
Fox is not great, but she is serviceable as her hardened unfeeling soldier of fortune. It was a little weird having this untouched model humping it in the brush, but I will say that her physicality was better than expected. Her cold characteristic also benefited her apparent skill.
These were some positives, but lets not get too far ahead of ourselves. This is pretty basic and unspectacular. In general, the characters were goofy jokes or nothing fodder. There is little to no depth beyond the social jabs and the wanton violence was gratuitous (for good or ill). Probably the biggest problem was its necessity to center on the rogue killing machine lion. It is at least almost all cgi, and it was pretty poor. None of it looked real, be that budget, time, or skill; it rarely worked. And when that is the key element of your film, it all falls pretty flat/made-for-TV-esque.
It is pretty watchable but never anything more. You probably won’t hate it, but it doesn’t have much to give in the long run.
