Movie Review: 'The Prey' is Yet Another Most Dangerous Game

Richard Connell’s 1924 short story The Most Dangerous Game is one of the most popular and influential stories of all time. Connell’s vision of a big game hunter whose grown weary of hunting animals and instead decides on a prey that has more of a fighting chance, has fascinated movie makers for decades. There are dozens of straight ahead adaptations of The Most Dangerous Game of varying titles and quality.

Then, there are the slightly more indirect adaptations of The Most Dangerous Game. A movie like The Prey, for instance, is not a straight ahead adaptation of The Most Dangerous Game but writer-director Jimmy Henderson has undoubtedly embraced the concept of Connell’s short story. Setting the movie in Cambodia with an all Asian cast and multiple non-English dialogues, Henderson nevertheless crafts a story that would be easily sussed out with or without subtitles.

Newcomer Gu Shangwei stars in The Prey as Xin, a Chinese government agent who has infiltrated a criminal gang in Cambodia in hopes of shutting down the drug trade. Unfortunately, before Xin can accomplish his goal, he’s interrupted by Cambodian authorities who burst into the fortified drug den, built inside of an apartment complex, and begin killing and arresting everyone inside. Xin is rounded up and must acquiesce to his arrest to keep his cover.

Not that revealing himself would have done him any good. It turns out, this was not a bust by the Cambodian authorities. Rather, this was the work of The Warden (Vithaya Pansringarm) a sadistic criminal running a secret prison on the Cambodian border, far from the prying eyes of authorities. The Warden’s prisoners are essentially chattel for the slaughter as they are sold off as prey to high end hunters eager to play that Most Dangerous Game.

Xin will have to use his intense government training in order to stay alive as he battles three high price hunters. The first is Payuk (, Sahajak Boonthanakit) the oldest of the hunters and the one most desperate to prove he’s still a man. Then there is Mat (Byron Bishop), who makes his money by getting guys like Payuk to go on The Warden’s unique hunting trips for a pricey fee. Rounding out the group is Mat’s dilettante nephew, Ti (Nophand Boonyai), a trust fund baby with a drug habit and a hot temper.

Once the premise is established, our hero is placed into harm's way alongside 9 other soon to be dead men. Here is where The Prey turns into a rather typical, at times rather sloppy, action movie. We quickly reduce the number of participants in this hunt and Xin begins to fight back against heavy odds by finding clever and violent ways to avoid capture and being killed while also killing anyone who gets in the way of his survival.

If you’ve seen or read an adaptation of The Most Dangerous Game then you know the parts that The Prey has cribbed from that story, the basic premise of hunting humans. The rest falls on the shoulders of writer director Jimmy Henderson who proves to be a capable if unspectacular auteur of violence. The Prey has some impressive gore and some cool martial arts but the characters are underdeveloped.

Gu Shangwei is a solid young actor with an appealing face and strong physicality but his Xin is not the most compelling action hero. He’s not asked to develop much of a character in The Prey, instead, Shangwei is treated more like a blunt instrument than a human being, a blunt instrument with incredible aim with a gun that is. He’s more impressive than our three hunters whose traits are old and sadistic, handsome and sadistic and rich/crazy.

The Prey is, I suppose, a good enough action movie that may satisfy genre fans by mixing a well known premise with solid violence and a little martial arts. For me however, I was left cold by The Prey because I never became involved with the characters beyond the base notion of their basic human survival. I didn’t want the hero to die is about as compelling as The Prey ever became for me and that’s not nearly enough for me to recommend it beyond the most modest recommendation for genre fans.