“My teeth are floating… I should take a piss.”
Film history has brought us more than a few adaptations and takes (as the kids like to say) on Richard Connell’s short story “The Most Dangerous Game,” and why not? It has an irresistible premise where, following a shipwreck, a poor schmo washes up on the shores of a private island owned by a man so rich, the only thing he derives any pleasure from is hunting humans for sport. It’s been repurposed and reimagined from every conceivable angle, but the power dynamics at play tend to be the most fertile ground for any film even marginally inspired by it—or its countless derivations.
The dystopian sci-fi flick DRAGN, attempts to leverage them for a tale of AI gone violently rogue, whether intentionally manipulated by its wealthy overlords or not, and picks off a bunch of expendable laborers one by one. The film takes its title from the design of said drone, reminiscent of that baby dragon from Harry Potter if it were a homicidal mechanical maniac. The film’s cold open involves a mercenary named Zoja (Alice Pagani) surviving some sort of attack on her team.
Tom Wilson (James Paxton) is in Serbia representing his vaguely defined tech company’s “Chicago Office” to get some real deal face time with his international team. In a page out of the Homer Simpson playbook, Tom has brought his wife and daughter along with him so they can just hang out and do nothing in a Serbian hotel while he goes on a team building exercise with his work colleagues. This is all a violation of his company’s policy, by the way, as he was instructed to come alone.
As for Tom’s team, there’s Dan (Carlos Bardem) and Adele (Lilly Krug), who banter like father and daughter, horndog Sebastian (Franz Drameh) who wandered over from the set of an 80s boob comedy, and their team leader Jacob (Jadran Malkovich, no relation). Soon after getting a really half-assed explanation for what they’ve been brought there to do from the company’s enigmatic CEO Petros (Alex Lane, more on this fella in a minute), the team is soon trudging out into the Serbian woods without any technology—phones and laptops have been confiscated, though we’ll soon discover that basically everyone smuggled tech in anyway.
The film does its damndest to get us to care about these characters, though really it’s just the white dude with the family we’ve met who is given any manner of depth. Anyway, it isn’t long before team members start getting picked off by an unseen force of some sort, which has been surveilling them throughout the film (represented by some DRAGN P.O.V. shots).
I get the feeling that Predator was on TNT a couple of times during the week this script was being revised. This movie wants to be Predator so badly, down to not revealing the title character in full until we’re past the one hour mark. After losing at least one of their members, the team stumbles across the remains of the film’s cold open, where female mercenary Zoja reveals herself to have survived, and thank goodness, she’s got some much needed exposition to deliver.
There’s some vague message about the expendability of people in the age of AI buried in here, but you, dear viewer, will have to do the legwork to suss it out and decide what was the movie’s message. By the time we come all the way back around to Tom’s family, the film’s message gets fairly muddled, and the ending isn’t a dystopian mic drop so much as it is confusing.
Earlier, I mentioned the fella playing the ruthless tech bro CEO, a man by the name of Alex Lane. At first, I thought he was the dude that played Miloš on Seinfeld, but it’s not him. I’m sure Mr. Lane is a really nice guy, I’ll bet everyone had a good experience working with him, but he shouldn’t have a role where he’s required to deliver fundamental expositional dialogue. I remarked to my daughter who was watching with me, “I’ll bet he’s one of the producers and demanded a role.” Sure enough, he’s the film’s first credited producer. Correlation doesn’t not imply causation, I know, but my guy walked on screen with an energy that screamed, “I paid money to be here.”
I don’t want to be mean, I promise, there’s just so few people in the movie itself, it feels a bit to me like dereliction of duty on the part of director Peter Webber for allowing a performance that distractingly bad into his film. It makes the film feel cheap, which is unfortunate because they clearly invested money in their special effects. Except that blasted cgi blood effect, which has not evolved one whit since the 1990s. I get that it’s great on a splatter movie not having to reset everything for another take because of squibs, but cgi blood will never, ever look real.
As “Most Dangerous Game” riffs go, this isn’t the worst one I’ve seen by a country mile, but it does feel desperately inessential. It feels fifteen minutes late to a conversation that everyone else has already finished having, rehashing points as other, better films say, “I know, we just said that.” Audiences crave something new couched in the familiar, but they’ll go right back to the version they know and like if you’re not bringing anything worthwhile to the table.