Trailer Review - ROGUE

I will be completely honest: I have never been a fan of Megan Fox, for a couple of reasons. First, acting is not her strong suit. Oh, she's not terrible. She's just not the kind of good that someone who gets paid to act should be. I know a guy who thinks she's pretty enough to be a super hero who's superpower is sexiness. I disagree. I think maybe she should be a little more interesting for someone just trading on their looks. Besides that, she has the same look or expression on her face almost all the time. It's like someone told her that her acting sucked right before they turned the camera on. I know most of this is not her fault. It's Michael Bay's fault.

Regardless of all of this, I have to thank her today. With the movie business almost destroyed by the plague, I didn't think I would get to write a review like this anytime soon. But then Megan Fox and some other fine people fixed that for me. They dropped the trailer for "ROGUE."

So, Megan is a badass mercenary. (Don't laugh, it could happen in an alternate dimension, maybe.) Also, she is the leader of a group of other badass mercenaries. Which means that she is either tougher, smarter, or more of a badass than the other badasses. Which might be demonstrated by her decision to apply lipstick, blush, mascara and eyeliner before going into battle on the Savana.

So, cue the rap music and into battle they go. Some baddies in Africa have taken a bunch of children as hostages and brought them to a compound in the middle of nowhere. Fortunately, Megan and her team have been hired to rescue them. And somehow they have found the compound and are going to bust the hostages out during a gun battle. Okay. But the baddies manage to shoot down the helicopter that was supposed to be Megan's ride home. So, Megan and her group are forced to drive out with the bad guys in pursuit. This is okay until their ride breaks down and they are forced to take shelter in a big spooky house (also in the middle of nowhere).

In a lesser (or maybe better) film, Megan and her buddies would turn the abandoned house into a fortress and fight off the bad guys in a series of pitched battles in which the hostages would eventually have to help the mercenaries rescue them. But, this is not that movie.

Instead monsters, in the form of a pride of lions, appear and start picking off the mercenaries one at a time. So, it's not Assault on Precinct 13. It's Anaconda (without John Voight's Robert DeNiro impression).

Let's stop for a moment. I would like to commend Megan at this time. No matter what happens with these lions in this movie, this is a huge step up from when a robot dog was humping her leg in Transformers 2. So good job for that.

So this is when we discover that heavily armed combat vets, who have been shot at and had stuff blown up around them, are no match for big cats. Now I am not suggesting that lions in the wild are not dangerous, however I am suggesting that professional soldiers, who have night vision goggles and automatic weapons, might be more dangerous. And the lions might be less inclined to attack after they hear some gunfire or explosions (or rap music).

But, ignore all that, because your action movie just morphed into a horror movie. Just like you ignored the blush and mascara that Megan Fox wears into battle. Just like you should ignore that a movie which takes place in Africa doesn't seem to have many Africans in it.

But if none of that seems right to you and you really want to see a good movie about dangerous lions who have a taste for human flesh and the people who have to deal with them...

Ghost and the Darkness is available through PRIME. And while we're suggesting other movies, Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) is similarly available, as is Anaconda. Though I'm only suggesting you watch that if you watch the Rifftrax version.