Prey

Survival in the Kalahari Desert, physical and spiritual

A missionary couple in Africa (Ryan Phillippe and Mena Suvari) are forced to take a flight with a questionable bush pilot (Emile Hirsch). Unfortunately, they & several others end up stuck in the barren areas of Southwest Africa with plenty of lions and hyenas roaming about.

"Prey" (2024) was originally called Kalahari, but changed to the hackneyed Prey. The movie poster isnt that far removed from the 2007 movie Prey. At heart, this is a modern take on Sands of the Kalahari and Flight of the Pheonix with a key element of Conan the Barbarian (1982) thrown in. While this is the least of em due to its low-budget, it works well enough for a slow-burn survival adventure wherein t...

Could this really be the same Ryan Philippe who was in "Cruel Intentions"? Are things really that bad? Well now he's "Andrew" who runs a Christian missionary deep in the Kalahari. Forced to flee, they engage the rather untrustworthy services of pilot "Grun" (Emile Hirsch) and next thing they are amidst some wreckage in the middle of a wild game reserve with loads of hungry lions, hyenas, scorpions and a few heavily armed freedom fighters. Can they survive? There are some beautiful animals featured in this film and the Californian Vasquez Rocks National Park serves well enough as a location double, but the rest of this is all really quite poorly written and executed before a denouement that I could have done with half an hour earlier. There'...