Primitive War review – it’s Green Berets vs dinosaurs in cheerfully cheesy Vietnam war gorefest

Set to an on-the-nose soundtrack of Creedence Clearwater, an elite squad of soldiers are suitably unprepared for their large-toothed assailants in this jungle thriller Aimed squarely and unabashedly at viewers who love soldiers, gore and dinosaurs – as well as dinosaurs goring soldiers – this adaptation of Ethan Pettus’s 2017 novel is deeply repetitive but weirdly watchable. Although shot in Australia with a mostly Australian cast sprinkled with a few American actors, it’s supposed to be set in Vietnam in the late 1960s as the US armed forces take on the Viet Cong. But there are other forces to contend with, and we don’t just mean covert Chinese or Soviet operatives, although the latter do feature significantly here. It turns out a nefarious scientific experiment by one of the aforementioned factions has accidentally ushered a whole army of dinosaurs into the jungle and they’ve begun gaily munching their way through anyone who gets in their way. When one squad of Green Berets go miss...

Renegades review – veteran musclemen team up for ‘geri-action’ caper

Nick Moran and Lee ‘Six Million Dollar Man’ Majors are the star names in this UK thriller, but they are let down by inept action sequences and stilted banter

Cheap as undercooked chips, this British thriller about elderly ex-soldiers avenging a friend’s death belatedly cashes in on the 2010s trend for “geri-action” films, to borrow a term coined by Vulture’s Matt Patches. Though less slick, it resembles those American fisticuff- and gunfire-packed thrillers (the Red and Expendables franchises, for example) built around former big-name actors supplementing their pension schemes.

Directed by Daniel Zirilli, the film features Nick Moran (still best known for Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels) as the low-profile protagonist, Burton, a former SAS man suffering from PTSD. He gets scooped up on the street by an old acquaintance, American veteran Carver (former Six Million Dollar Man Lee Majors), who has a beef with some gangsters in his London neighbourhood who are trafficking women, selling drugs and, given the age of everyone here, possibly dealing in black market ration cards.

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