From the mid-2000s to the mid-2010s, Megan Fox was a force to be reckoned with. Appearing in franchises including Michael Bay’s Transformers and the ill-advised Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles update, Fox was everywhere – and a sex symbol for teenage boys all over the world. In recent years, she has seemingly taken a step back from the limelight but 2020 heralded something of a comeback for the star with two abysmal films: Think Like a Dog and Rogue.
While the former of her 2020 output featured a telepathic pooch, it still wasn’t as bad as this atrocious effort from M.J. Bassett (Solomon Kane, Deathwatch). This trashy action flick sees Fox as a mercenary whose team gets trapped in Africa during a mission, ultimately being hunted by a blood-thirsty psychotic lioness over a dark and dangerous 12 hours as they await extraction.
Rogue is, at its core, another in a very long line of (wo)man vs. nature action thrillers, and makes absolutely zero effort to do anything even remotely fresh with the tired old genre. Expect to see many characters torn apart by the lioness with CGI blood flying all over the place, and plenty of action scenes for an excuse to show us Megan Fox toting heavy artillery. Without the budget of adequate effects to make Rogue work, what we get is a film that feels like something out of the Sharknado universe.
Clunky dialogue (the screenplay was penned by director Bassett and her daughter Isabel) and painfully wooden performances from the entire cast result in a film that doesn’t even fall under the so-bad-it’s-good banner, rather, it is simply so-bad-it’s-bad. Rogue is an absolute mess of a film with absolutely nothing going for it, except for – at a push – some of the action is mildly entertaining, albeit totally mindless. The film feels like something Fox would’ve done at the height of her powers in 2008, especially with the CGI on display here that feels like it’s stuck in the late 2000s. Maybe then, in the era of Transformers, Rogue could’ve been a hit.
Cheesy, cheap but certainly not cheerful, Rogue is a clunky and bland action thriller that feels almost 15 years too late.
Rogue is on Digital Download 9 November and DVD 16 November