ROGUE

Michael Vartan

ROGUE (2007). Produced, written and directed by Greg McLean.

Pete McKell (Michael Vartan), an American travel writer, goes on a boat tour in the Northern reaches of Australia and gets a lot more than he bargained for. The pretty tour guide, Kate (Radha Mitchell), is heading back to their point of origin when she turns the boat around to investigate what might be a distress flair. Instead she and a boat load of panicking tourists encounter a huge man-eating crocodile that smashes into and incapacitates their boat. Seems they have inadvertently wandered into its territorial waters. The motley group is now trapped on an island that will be completely underwater when the tide goes up in a few hours -- and nighttime is coming. The crocodile can see in the dark, but they can't ... 

Radha Mitchell and Sam Worthington

Rogue is a stand-out in the monster movie sweepstakes. It has sweeping and often stunning cinematography (Will Gibson) of beautiful and eerie Australian vistas, rivers, mountains and jungle areas, not to mention underground caverns. The characters are much better developed than usual, and there's an atmospheric score by Francois Tetaz. Handsome Vartan, famous for the TV show Alias, and Mitchell give very good lead performances, and there is fine back-up from such as Sam Worthington as a wannabe boyfriend of Kate's and a host of good character actors. The final section of the film has Pete in the creepy underground den of the huge predator, fighting for his life against all odds. If the movie has one problem -- aside from a few slow spots -- it's that some of the sequences are under-lit, possibly to hide the fakeness of the animatronic crocodile. CGI appears to have been employed as well. 

Verdict: Suspenseful and very classy creature feature. ***.