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Ain't It Cool News
October 26, 2006
More Readers Wrestle With Greg McLean's ROGUE!!
By Angelus104
SPOILERS!
I attended a screening in New York of the new Greg "Wolf Creek" McLean horror-fest "Rogue." It is the story of an American journalist (Michael "I sucked it up on Alias" Vartan) who goes to Australia to write an article for a travel magazine. The particular travel experience he is writing about is a boat tour of crocodiles down a very scary and unpopulated river. Our boat captain is the lovely Rhada Mitchell and the rest of the passengers are an interesting group of character actors. one of which is John Jarrett who was scary as all hell in McLean's previous film Wolf Creek. Well the tour goes just fine until a passenger sees a distress flair and the gang has to head further down river into what Mitchell calls "sacred territory" complete with a huge native cliff wall drawing of a crocodile. Well when they get way down river they find an overturned boat and then BAM! something huge takes down their boat and they are stuck on a little island that will be gone when the river tide comes in. The rest of the movie is basically them trying to find away off the island and trying to prevent themselves from getting eaten by a monster of a croc'.
Let me first start with the bad here. Number one is Michael Vartan. I don't really understand how he keeps getting work. He was always my least favorite part of Alias and I mean if you don't get better after 5 years of playing the same character what hope is there for you. Here I actually liked him near the start of the film when he is being kind of a dick, and funny but once the drama starts I just don't believe him. And at the end when the real supposed terror kicks in he is actually laughable. I never knew there was a talent in yelling a name but there must be cause he doesn't have it.
Other than Vartan the film suffers from some pacing issues it clocks in at about 1:40 but really should be ten minutes shorter. It also falls into a series of horror movie traps with singular big problems replacing real character traits (cancer, dead wife et.) And the ending is really pretty toothless, no pun intended, and all too predictable.
The good, The movie is basically a stylistic update of just about every "giant underwater creature" movie ever made. It is shot beautifully though, and really takes advantage of the landscape it inhabits. The crocodile himself is awesome. The cg is nearly perfect and you feel genuine menace from the animal and he produces all of the movies really intense scares. Also the supporting cast, when they are given the material, are really good. Unfortunately you aren't given enough on them to care. And at times the movie is intentionally very funny.
The overall problem with the movie though is it isn't anything you haven't seen before. It is much better than Lake Placid or any of the sci-fi channel movies that seem to be made about this kind of thing all the time. But it feels like its striving to be "Jaws in the Outback" and its just not. Its an enjoyable genre film but i wouldn't pay my ten bucks for it.
© Harry Knowles 2006
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