'Primeval' is embarrassingly bad croc tale

PRIMEVAL — * — Dominic Purcell, Orlando Jones; rated R (violence, gore, profanity); Carmike 12 and Ritz 15; Century Sandy and South Salt Lake; Cinemark Jordan Landing; Megaplex District, Gateway and Jordan Commons.

"Based on a true story" doesn't quite work for "Primeval." How about "Almost entirely unlike the true story" or "An utter croc of a true story?"

You've seen that oft-repeated PBS documentary on Gustav, the man-eating African croc? "Primeval" is an absurd Disney fictionalization of his tale, that of a 25- to 30-foot Burundi crocodile who eats and eats and eats Africans in the middle of nowhere.

But when the film begins, he chomps down on a European (white) pathologist. Not smart.

"He's like O.J. Simpson," cracks TV cameraman Steven (Orlando Jones). "He messed up when he killed that white woman."

Jones pretends he's in another, funnier version of this movie. He's the wiseacre videographer sent with producer Tim (Dominic Purcell of TV's "Prison Break") and cutesy "animal story" reporter Akiva (Brooke Langton) to capture the monster Gustav for a TV network "in time for sweeps."

There's a "Crocodile Hunter" clone (Gideon Emery) with a big cage, a guy who cares more for reptiles than people. There's also a grizzled great white hunter, played by Jurgen Prochnow, with his finger on the trigger of an elephant gun.

Prochnow is acting as if he's in a better version of "Primeval," too, one in which his cragged face and reptilian eyes suggest a human version of the monster he hunts. He's had a lifelong war with a beast that won't be captured, as PBS discovered (a French team, if memory serves).

The movie is a wild, idiotic mash-up of "Hotel Rwanda" civil-war atrocities and cheap gotchas from the cartoon croc. John Brancato ("Catwoman") had a hand in the script, so maybe the tone problems start there.

The TV crew is caught up in a bloody warlord's slaughter of his own people, and the crocodile is making a meal of anyone foolish enough to enter the water.

There's lots of water. Everywhere. Where do the TV folks take refuge when things go wrong? In a shack on stilts. In the water.