Somewhere in the distant past, Greg McLean must have had one shocker of a summer holiday. Ever since 2005’s Wolf Creek, the Australian director has tormented holidaymakers with tales of vacations gone horribly awry. We’ve had murderous bushmen (Wolf Creek and its sequel), killer crocs (Rogue), ancient evils (The Darkness) and now this tale of four backpackers getting soundly spanked by Mother Nature.
Never comes close to seizing us by the throat.
Daniel Radcliffe leads the gap year misadventure, all but unrecognisable beneath a scraggly beard and thick Israeli accent. As Yossi Ghinsberg (upon whose real-life account this film is based), Radcliffe assumes the unbearable smugness of so many student travellers, throwing common sense to the wind in the pursuit of self-discovery. Yet even the most insufferable twatpacker would surely look askance if a mysterious Austrian geologist strolled up to them in a market with the promise of lost tribes and Incan gold. Not so Yossi. With barely a hat-tip towards seriously questioning his shady guide’s motives, Ghinsberg and his travelling chums (Swiss teacher Marcus and American bro-tographer Kevin) hire up their grubby cargo pants and follow their Karl into the Bolivian bush with nary a Lonely Planet between them. It’s at this point that things begin to go guava-shaped, surprising precisely no-one except the feckless trekkers themselves.
Fake-out scares and a macabre monkey roast pepper our time marvelling at the South American foliage (captured with vibrant flair by cinematographer Stefan Duscio), as the quartet yomps further into the jungle, but it’s not long before the stress-lines begin to show. Karl and Kevin begin locking horns with increasing regularity, while Marcus’ ailing feet make him the group’s obvious weak link — the speed with which his ‘friends’ suggest abandoning him showering none of them in glory. By the time the group splits up (the events surrounding which being a significant departure from what actually happened) and Radcliffe finds himself alone and without provisions, we’re already an hour in and nearly as travel-worn as our protagonist.
Once the film finally gets going, though, Radcliffe acquits himself admirably as nature’s bitch: his wide-eyed panic and widening mental-fracturing never less than convincing. But deep within the trunks there’s little either literally or figuratively for the actor to sink his teeth into. McLean wheels out an assortment of slithering, creeping horrors with which to torment his hero, ranging from the startling (a grumpy snake) to the stomach-churning (a parasitic head-worm) and the hoarily uninspired (a headlong stumble into quicksand). But it’s all far too drawn out to maintain much tension and any sense of peril is thoroughly defused by the fact that, based on an autobiography, the eventual outcome is never in doubt.
As a survival adventure, this ticks the requisite boxes (eating bird foetuses, bludgeoning reptiles, taking on a jaguar with a can of deodorant) and its aesthetic is hard to fault, but unlike McLean’s more fanciful adventures, this never comes close to seizing us by the throat. To compound the issue, the film’s postscript hints at another, untold story that sounds vastly more compelling, leaving the distinct impression we’d have been far more entertained had we left Yossi to his fate and stuck with the malingering teacher instead.