What A Croc!

Primeval is the story of three reporters who set out to capture a giant mythological killer crocodile, who the locals affectionately call Gustave. Yes, I’m serious. Reporters try to catch a crocodile. Not that I haven’t seen reporters do some really stupid things before, but it usually stops short of flying to Africa to catch a giant crocodile. But who cares right? We’re here to watch a fun campy movie where a crocodile tears up a few people.

Well, that’s where Primeval goes dreadfully wrong. Primeval tries to be two movies. On one hand it tries to make a serious social commentary about how most of Africa is torn apart by dueling warlords, and how America doesn’t care about Darfur. This half of the movie is trying to be like Blood Diamond, but actually makes me care a little less about Africa because instead of having a strong likable African character (like Djimon Hounsou in Blood Diamond) all of the Africans are pretty despicable and you don’t mind too much when the croc eats them. So try and make you care about Africa, but don’t give you any Africans to care about…brilliant filmmaking. And lets not forget this part of the movie is unbelievably boring, unless you like watching people talk about African politics while watching a steel cage on a TV monitor.

Then suddenly, somewhere in the middle of the movie we make a complete 360 to an all out creature feature. Gustave is big and mean and tearing shit apart. This is sorta what I expected from a movie about a giant crocodile, but after sitting through the first half this portion of the movie just seems too ridiculous. If the movie started out with something crazy and campy at the beginning, the second half would be absolutely perfect.

In particular, there is a scene of Orlando Jones running from the crocodile that is absolutely hilarious, and would get an automatic five stars if the rest of the movie had built up to justify it. Then…following that scene we find Orlando Jones died offscreen! They killed the comic relief character offscreen! Creature feature rule #1 guys: The comic relief character either lives, or has a particularly hilarious death, or at the very worst becomes really serious and sacrifices himself to save the main characters. None of that happened…he just sorta died off by himself in the swamp somewhere (offscreen), and later they stumble across his body.

But that does bring us to one positive point. Orlando Jones is funny, and his comedy is on point and well delivered. The acting, in general, is pretty decent as well. Primeval is essentially a movie killed by a director trying to do a political drama, and a studio trying to do a creature feature, with the result of failing to do either.