2019's Primal Enjoyably Casts Nicolas Cage as a Larger Than Life Hunter In One Heck of a Jam
The Travolta/Cage Project is an ambitious, years-long multi-media exploration of the fascinating, overlapping legacies of Face/Off stars John Travolta and Nicolas Cage with two components: this online column exploring the actor’s complete filmographies in chronological order and the Travolta/Cage podcast, where Clint Worthington, myself and a series of fascinating guests discuss the movies I write about here.
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I’ve been weaning myself off my phone and my addiction to social media by throwing myself into work and seeing and writing about as many Nicolas Cage movies as possible. The actor has made so many films in the past fifteen years, however, that ultimately just means that I’ve already seen five out of the seven movies he made in 2019 rather than two or three.
Maybe it’s the ADHD, but I am disproportionately impressed by actors' abilities to memorize their lines. That’s why I have a certain grudging admiration for even the most terrible and misguided performances: at least the actors involved remembered their lines.
Nicolas Cage has made so many movies with so many commonalities that I wonder sometimes if he loses track of which movie he’s making and what role he’s playing.
Cage plays so many cops, crooks, and cops who are actually crooks and crooks who are secretly cops that he can’t possibly keep all of them straight.
That makes me grateful for movies like 2019’s Primal, in which Cage technically plays a criminal because he plays fast and loose with the law, but he mostly plays a hunter.
In Primal Cage plays Frank Walsh, a larger-than-life, cigar-chomping big game hunter on the lookout for an elusive black jaguar.
Then, one magical evening, the globe-trotting thrill seeker finds something even rarer and even more valuable: a white jaguar worth a not-so-small fortune.
The boozing rapscallion uses a ship to transport the big cat that has an unpleasant passenger in Richard Loffler (Kevin Durand). He’s a super-assassin who killed all sorts of people for all sorts of organizations and countries and was compensated handsomely for his services.
Then he went rogue and started killing the wrong people and was arrested and given the Hannibal Lecter treatment.
Durand is a behemoth of a man who looks a little like a handsome man who has had a layer of skin peeled off. He’s creepy and intimidating and takes great delight in fucking with the minds of everyone onboard.
The temporarily imprisoned outlaw is, in his own way, a hunter, but his prey are humans, and he works for governments and covert organizations rather than zoos or private collectors.
Richard toys relentlessly with the unfortunate souls onboard like a cat sadistically tossing a terrified mouse from paw to paw. He’s a deadly threat even when he’s shackled and caged. When he gets free and lets loose some of the exotic animals onboard he becomes a danger to every living thing on the ship.
The elevator pitch for Primal is White Hunter, Black Heart by way of Die Hard, and Snakes on a Plane. There are snakes on a boat in Primal, but they’re pussycats compared to the jaguar.
The jaguar is rendered through CGI that gives the beast a disconcerting airlessness that renders it much less scary. I’m not sure I would want them to use an actual jaguar, as animal acting is some evil shit, particularly for the animals involved, but the jaguar looks unmistakably like a cartoon, and this is not Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
Once the bad guy escapes, Primal becomes a story of survival, with Cage’s macho man leading the hunt for killers of the human and animal variety. He’s assisted, after a fashion, by fed Paul Freed (Michael Imperioli) and Dr. Ellen Taylor (Famke Jannsen), a Navy lieutenant monitoring the captive’s health.
Danger is all around. The motley crew onboard is understandably terrified that they will end up dying via a sniper’s bullet or the bloody claws and razor-sharp teeth of a jaguar. Also, there are snakes. I’m guessing none of that was in the brochure when our anti-hero booked his trip. They probably went on and on about non-existent amenities like an Olympics-sized swimming pool, a bottomless chocolate buffet, and Broadway-style entertainment rather than being honest about the crazed murderers and man-eating jungle cats.
It falls upon Frank, a swaggering alpha male who has seen his better days to hunt the very deadliest prey—man—to keep the assassin on the loose from turning their vessel into a ghost ship.
Durand’s wild-eyed maniac takes great joy in his savagery, but he’s unsentimental enough to know that killing a man with a rifle at long range is more effective than shooting a man at close range, but only after revealing every detail of your evil plan, secure that they will never be able to use that information to their advantage on account of their imminent deaths.
Setting Primal almost entirely on a boat lends the proceedings a certain claustrophobia. It also gives the action a certain coherence since we know where we are on the boat.
The hunter becomes the hunted and vice versa. The white jaguar is supposed to be an additional deadly variable but he recedes into the background of the movie for the most part.
It shouldn’t be difficult to find a colorful and entertaining role for Nicolas Cage. The man could not be more colorful or entertaining yet movie after movie from this period cast him as cops who get too close to the case or criminals with messy, complicated and doomed lives.
There are other roles, you know! Older actors don’t have to play just cops and crooks. They can also, for example, play cigar-chomping big game hunters with a distinct Humphrey Bogart rakish outlaw quality.
Like Bogart, in his most famous role, Cage plays an idealist masquerading as a cynic and nihilist. He may act like nothing matters beyond the million dollar payday waiting for him when he sells the white jaguar but secretly he cares about the lives of others as well.
Thematically and quality-wise, this reminded me of Plane, a similarly no-nonsense, minimalist, macho action movie about passengers in trouble. Plane was one of last year’s nicest surprises, just as the thoroughly entertaining Primal has been one of the nicer surprises from this grim period in Cage’s career.
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