The opening scene of "Rogue" sets the stage for this poorly crafted thriller perfectly: a bunch of bored-looking mercenaries are just doing their job rescuing a walking payday from sex traffickers. The main protagonist of the team is the always expressionless Megan Fox, who seems to be doing exactly what her character is doing--cashing a paycheck.
To be fair to Miss Fox, I don't blame her. I blame the casting director.
OBLIGATORY PLOT RECAP:
"Roar" follows a team of mercenaries lead by "Boss" Megan Fox as they rescue some of the most annoying young women from human trafficking somewhere in Africa. When cornered in an abandoned complex, the team and their pursuers are slowly picked apart by feral lions.
I won't even bother talking at length about the awful CGI lions. They were bad in the trailer and they're worse in the movie. "Why?" you may ask. Because there's so much more of them, which really allows the laziness of the CGI to sink in.
Instead of talking about the awful CGI lions at length, lets discuss a few things that are a little less obvious but equally appalling.
BAD EDITING:
The filmmakers clearly don't know how to tell a story. The first car chase/gun battle sequence has so many wasted shots that do nothing to propel the story forward, and this is a problem the movie suffers from throughout. This may sound like a minor gripe, but it's a symptom of a much larger problem.
Things like shot choices, camera angles, character beats, and jokes, are thrown around because they're cool or to fill time or to give the illusion of development, but in actuality this is story-telling at its most shallow. You can tell there's effort to craft interesting characters here, and, to be fair, some of it works, but it's all padded by so much lifelessness, gunfire, and bad editing that the entire movie drowns amidst the wasted potential.
BAD EDITING EXAMPLE:
After a ridiculously prolonged escape sequence rife with terrible editing, one of the heroes remarks that they need to keep going because they haven't gotten far enough away from their pursuers. The choice of camera angle here is key because we the viewers can clearly see in the background that our characters have, in fact, come a very long way and are in no immediate danger. It equals a wasted line of dialogue, a wasted shot, and more wasted time.
Oh, and then an alligator pops up because... something needed to happen? I'm not sure.
You can always tell when someone's about to die in "Roar" because the camera angels are so cliche. The back-and-fourth cutting during numerous gunfights is so ham-fisted and lacking in creativity that you'll be surprised how you can fall asleep amidst so much gunfire.
BAD CHOREOGRAPHY:
If the characters aren't running and shooting guns, then they're driving cars and shooting guns, or getting shot by guns, or getting eaten by lions, or shooting lions, or getting eaten while shooting lions. No matter what they're doing while they're shooting their guns, they do it in the most boring way possible. A knife fight at the end of the movie has a few seconds of interesting choreography, but apart from that the lack of creativity and the almost endless gunfire makes the movie feel b-grade, like they couldn't afford anything but blank rounds.
BAD DIALOGUE:
When the characters are in "mercenary mode" they like to use dialogue lifted from every single detective show on TV. Words like "asset" and "boss" are used as though the writers did no research into the actual lifestyle of such characters beyond watching reruns of "Criminal Minds." The rest of the dialogue exists to spoon-feed the audience exposition in the most boring and predictable ways possible.
BAD DIALOGUE EXAMPLE:
When the baddies manage to pin down the heroes in a building, Megan Fox quickly sets some explosives on one side of the room to create an escape hole in the building. It's obvious to the viewer what she's doing, but a side character idiotically screams in fright, "You're going to blow up the building?!" to which Fox replies with all the boredom she can muster, "No, just the wall." Such dialogue is redundant and pointless. How much more badass would it have been for Fox's character to reply with an ACTION, like pressing the detonate button and letting the explosion just be her answer? It's amateurish dialogue and doesn't fit a character who is supposed to be this battle-hardened warrior.
And now that I think about it, it's the kind of dialogue that never ends. Everyone in this movie talks almost non-stop so you're never at a loss of what they're thinking, feeling, or planning to do. It sounds stupid. It makes the characters look stupid. It makes you the viewer feel stupid.
And it makes for one boring movie.
"Show don't tell" is one of the oldest rules in the writer's handbook, a rule the makers of "Rogue" clearly know nothing about. Or maybe they just forgot. Or maybe they took that rule and burned it in an effigy of good filmmaking.
