Rouge

This Megan Fox headlined action-suspense tale comes from an accomplished director in female M.J. Bassett, who spent time helming various TV shows befoere delving into features like this one as well as “Solomon Kane,” a 2009 entry that dealt with unsavory entities and the like set back a couple of hundreds of years ago. She also helmed the intriguing sequel “Silent Hill: Revelation” in 2012.

Now, with “Rogue,” she enters the action phase of Megan Fox’s solo career phase.

Fox brought in the teen male crowd with her turn as Shia LeBeouf’s girlfriend in the Michael Bay-directed “Transformers” in 2007, with “Transformers: Dark Side of the Moon.”

She then went on to do movie as well as the “meh” live action Michael Bay produced “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” (2014) a couple of years later Turtles,” once again teaming her up with producer/director Michael Bay.

In a system that currently has nothing but male headlining all the stories and franchises, it is nice to see the girls taking over for once. America embraced Jennifer Lawrence’s Katniss Eveerdine for “The Hunger Games” tales a few years ago, but studios can’t seem to find hat niche for well written tales and stories.

Earlier this summer I was looking forward to “Black Widow,” with Scarlett Johansson returning as Natasha Romanoff, one of the various members of “The Avengers,” but all this COVID stuff has put a giant monkey wrench into the grinder.

But I digress, since we’re here to talk about “Rogue,” a Lionsgate title that has essentially replaced all the small studios in the mass to give the American public a wider viewing library to look at all things mainstream.

So the plot here essentially deals with a group of baddies who kidnap girls travelling abroad and uses said girls aa bargaining chips (re: ransom).

Fox, like James Franco a few years back was part of that system that felt America should embrace this star. Sure, she is talented and easy on the eyes, but one just has to ask why I should invest my time with this star who has had more misses than hits in recent years. “Jonah Hex” (2010) with Josh Brolin comes to mind when discussing her career path. Even the star power of Brolin could not even save this tale.

I would recommend “Rogue” as a fun time-waster, but digress, since there are too many other titles I can recommend.

Namely “The Old Guard,” “6 Underground” and “Enola Holmes,” recently added to the Netflix line-up as a fun family flick.

“Rogue” is worth a watch, but as I recently pointed out there are too many other movies and tales I would recommend over this so-so flick.

Grade: C+
(Review by Ricky Miller)