Ideas done before are collected in a rather disjointed manner with stock characters everywhere you turn, but at least there’s a sense of forward momentum and action at regular intervals. Despite featuring many deaths, some torture, a child in peril, and a couple fairly bloody demises the whole thing feels a little light–a silly action movie you’d have on some Saturday while straightening up the place. 

Xin (Gu Shangwei), an undercover Chinese cop, gets picked up in a raid and shipped off to a remote Cambodian prison where his luck continues to sour when he and several other prisoners are sold off by the corrupt warden (Vithaya Pansringarm) to rich hunters looking for the thrill of hunting people. Even with Xin’s fellow officers, (Dy Sonita & Jia Ling), on the search for their missing colleague he’ll need to make unexpected allies and harsh decisions if he wants to make it out of the jungle alive.

Fan of dumb ‘90s action? The Prey is the kind where someone slaps together a Molotov cocktail in a manner of moments before standing out in the open to throw it at a guy with a machine gun, who then bursts into flames like a match before just as quickly falling dead to the ground without firing a shot–all in under 30 seconds! How about when our hero finds himself pretty much caught but then the idiot henchman puts his gun away so they can have a martial arts fight by a raging river? Stuff like that is what you’ll find here, which is definitely why it ends up feeling more of a silly, foolish action movie than anything else. Oh, or how about a scene where the bad guy tortures someone to music while talking too much?

As far as the story goes, it has more moving parts than it needs with a new subplot popping up every now and then for a couple minutes. The abundance of happenings inevitably leads to some characters falling by the wayside a bit or existing only to make stupid decisions to further the plot but I think the “and then this happens, and then this, and then–” template probably contributes to the forward momentum so I guess they picked their poison. There’s some musical overlap with The Silence of the Lambs at one point which I’m always happy to be reminded of, even if that’s more about me.

Anyway, overall you could do worse than The Prey if you’re in the mood for some breezy jungle-based action to half pay attention to where man is the most dangerous prey after all.

5 out of 10 Idiot Henchmen