Solid B-movie

I could watch a new adaptation of 1932’s The Most Dangerous Game” and not ever get bored with it. I noticed this first with “Hard Target”, a nice showcase for Van Damme but an even better American debut for Hong Kong director John Woo’s creatively kinetic visual style. “Surviving The Game”, coming from “Juice” director Ernest Dickerson, is not as good but it gets the job done. Silly, but in a thrilling, guilty pleasure sort of way.

The film has Ice-T playing a homeless man named Mason suspiciously hired to be a survival guide for a rich men’s hunting party. He knows nothing of surviving in the wilderness, but he needs money just the same. Mason soon finds himself alone in a remote cabin surrounded by acres of woods with these men, played by a who’s who of actors from Rutger Hauer, Gary Busey, John C. McGinley, Charles S. Dutton, and the most surprising part of this cast, F. Murray Abraham.


There’s an effective dinner scene early on where it seems like all these guys have been warped by the ideology of our forefathers; they’re trying to reconnect to their primal selves as well as the kill that’s right in front of them. To Mason, it all comes across like spiritual nonsense. Not so much the next day when he wakes up to see a gun pointed at his head. He’s being given a head start and he has til the end of breakfast before these guys jump on their motorbikes and give chase trying to kill him.

Of the hunters, Hauer takes creepy, blood-thirsty top honors here but any movie that has Busey playing a psychiatrist knows how to make fun out of goofiness. Only Abraham comes off a little weird here, not so much a seasoned hunter but more like a dad afraid his son (William MacNamara) is going to turn gay so he picks the worst idea ever to try and change that. Ice-T acquits himself well here too, he’s not so much an action hero physique but he has good presence, most of the most of his character’s tragic backstory, and is good with a one-liner.


I wish he had more of a Rambo survival instinct, or if not, if the movie got into his head a little more in how he outwits everybody (he seems particularly good at swooping down from trees a lot) but other than that the action is efficient and fast-paced. There’s a terrific cliff jump, some very intense mano-o-mano fights, and explosions and people getting things blown off captured very well by cinematographer Bojan Bazelli.

It’s less successful as a socially-conscious film, more so in its half-hearted attempts to make sure that you know that it knows that, yes, the homeless are people and it doesn’t support the views of the hunters in the film. It’s odd that the film was called racist, even if the hunters have some racial motivations as well as classist ones. These guys aren’t here to be care bears. They’re deplorables. And I miss the type of action picture where character's like them get the tables turned on them.