106 min | R | August 28, 2020 | Lionsgate
Megan Fox leads a mercenary squad on a hostage rescue across the South African bush. The mission collapses and the rescuers become the hunted. Then the lions show up, and the people turn out to be the easy part.
Samantha O’Hara leads a small mercenary unit into the South African wilderness to extract the kidnapped daughter of a provincial governor. The extraction goes wrong fast. The team gets pinned between a militia warlord and a stretch of bush with no exit, and then a starving lioness from an abandoned poaching farm starts hunting them too. M.J. Bassett builds the film as a survival pressure cooker that pits human cruelty against animal hunger. The real subject is the wildlife trade, and the lioness is a victim of the same men the soldiers are fighting.
Megan Fox plays Samantha as a commander who carries the weight of every decision. She underplays the action-hero swagger and lets exhaustion do the work. Philip Winchester plays Joey Kasinski as the steady second who keeps the unit functioning when morale breaks. Greg Kriek plays Mike Barasa with quiet conviction, and Brandon Auret turns the trafficker Elijah Dekker into a leering, casual sadist. Jessica Sutton plays the rescued Asilia as a young woman who refuses to stay a passive captive.
Bassett directs from a script she co-wrote with Isabel Bassett, who also appears as Tessa. Bassett shoots her own film, and the handheld camera stays tight on faces during the firefights to sell the chaos. The location work in the South African bush gives the survival sequences real heat and dust. The animatronic and digital lioness exposes the seams in the close work and breaks the tension whenever it fills the frame. The sound design carries more menace than the creature itself, with the lioness heard in the grass long before she is seen.
Rogue knows what it is and commits to it. The film welds a mercenary thriller to a creature feature and adds a conservation message that lands harder than it needs to. Fox anchors the chaos with a controlled, weary performance that gives the carnage a center. The effects let the film down at the exact moments it needs them most, but the energy never flags.