Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Most Dangerous Game’ on Prime Video, Where Liam Hemsworth Is The Human Prey In Christoph Waltz’s Deadly Hunting Game

This version of Most Dangerous Game (Prime Video) began life as episodic snippets on Quibi, the short attention span theater platform that was born and then died back in 2020. It was then part of the content haul snapped up by Roku after Quibi’s demise, where it did well enough to warrant the announcement of a second season. MDG also scored two Emmy nominations. For Prime, it’s cobbled together as a film, and acts as a kind of companion piece to Reacher, creator Nick Santora’s other action series for the streamer.

MOST DANGEROUS GAME: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Dodge Tyner (Liam Hemsworth) is getting desperate. His fledgling construction business’s biggest gamble sits half-built and empty in downtown Detroit, and he’s leveraged every bit of debt and personal favor he and pregnant wife Val (Sarah Gadon) can manage. And then there are the headaches. Face-splitting episodes that make him pass out. They tell him it’s a brain tumor, and that he’s terminal. So when he comes into contact with Miles Sellars, an executive type who runs something called The Tiro Fund, Dodge is inclined to listen to Sellars’ unlikely sales pitch. He’s incredulous, but doesn’t immediately walk away. “You want them to hunt me?”

The game is simple. It’s Dodge against five hunters. 24 hours, worth 50 G’s for every hour he stays alive. Game play stays within the Detroit city limits. No blabbing about the game to loved ones or friends. No ID, no cash, no cops. And no guns, either. Hunters have to “get creative,” Sellars tells him. Also, crowds are his friend. “Hunters don’t want to kill you too publicly, or they wind up spending the rest of their lives in prison under the fake identities we set up for them.” The game begins. Dodge runs. And Sellars enters his surveillance hub. He’s now Plutarch Heavensbee, and Detroit is Dodge’s Hunger Games arena.

One by one, from the Renaissance Center to Little Caesars Arena to the Detroit Princess Riverboat, the hunters reveal themselves to their prey. Nixon (Chris Webster) is a persnickety psychopath who favors fancy blades. Reagan (Billy Burke) is more rough-and-tumble with his leather jacket and buck knife. And Carter (Jimmy Akingbola) – yes, their aliases are all presidents – wields a hammer and a grip of disguises. Also on the hunt are Kennedy (Natasha Liu Bordizzo) and LBJ (Patrick Garrow), and monitoring the action is Sellars’ “cleaner,” Connell (Aaron Poole), who keeps the game free of disruption.

As Val, along with Dodge’s best pal Looger (Zach Cherry), tries to locate her husband and determine how cash keeps falling into her bank account, Dodge proves more adept at escape and evasion than Sellars initially anticipated. He’s still desperate, but gets smarter about surviving with every close shave. And as the game goes on, he discovers even more about how he came to be a part of it in the first place.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? If there’s an award for most adaptations of an original work, Richard Connell’s original 1924 short story “The Most Dangerous Game” is a contender. First up is the 1932 RKO Pictures version, starring Joel McCrea and Leslie Banks. (It’s also available on Prime Video.) But you could easily go with Hard Target, a John Woo-directed standout from Jean-Claude Van Damme’s ‘80s/’90s action library. Surviving the Game (1994) featured a fantastic cast in Rutger Hauer, Charles S. Dutton, Gary Busey, John C. McGinley, and Ice-T. And in 2020, The Hunt added a twist of satirical social criticism to the material while also functioning as a solid action thriller.

Performance Worth Watching: Zach Cherry, who plays Dylan on the Apple TV+ standout Severance, doesn’t have a whole lot to do in Dangerous, appearing every now and again to further the plotting around Hemsworth. But he makes the most of his scenes, lending touches of humor and depth to a storyline that’s otherwise pretty one dimensional.

Memorable Dialogue: Christoph Waltz plays Tiro Fund executive/gamemaster Miles Sellars as a refined, MBA version of Hans Landa, his gleeful SS sociopath from Inglorious Basterds. And as such, he imbues Sellars’ corporate gobbledygook with some deliciously slithery diction. “Dodge, I am what you would call a facilitator. I make possible the natural progression of man’s innate desire to be challenged.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: As with the outsized personalities who hunt Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Running Man – “I love this saw; this saw’s a part of me and I’m gonna make it part of you!” – there’s fun to be had in Most Dangerous Game as we discover the quirks and stylistic flourishes of each hunter Dodge encounters. Chris Webster, who uses his natural British accent but is otherwise the same raging psycho he played in Reacher, probably has the most fun with Nixon and his blades, but Billy Burke’s bizarre southern drawl adds to the scenery, too. And Hemsworth is sturdy enough as Dodge; each time he escapes the clutches of his pursuers, he adds a lair of steely determination that sets up the next hunter showdown. A sequence set among the exiting crowd after a Red Wings game feels lifted from the opening moments of Drive, but is nevertheless tightly paced and edited, and includes one of Dodge’s best means of evading Sellars’ constant surveillance.

That Dangerous once and still exists as a short form television show doesn’t interfere too much with this movie version. An opening title and credits roll is conspicuously absent, and the only subplot is Val and Looger looking for answers about Dodge’s whereabouts. But because the hunt is really its only feature, Dangerous rides well on its momentum once the action finally starts. Waltz is also a highlight here. (He was nominated for an Emmy.) He keeps Sellars’ eccentric nature and blase acceptance of violence at a steady simmer, but does deliver a deliciously unhinged diatribe about the deadly game’s vaunted history dating back to the Roman Empire.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Most Dangerous Game doesn’t stray from the familiar beats of its oft-adapted source material, but delivers an economical stab at action pacing with mild thriller elements.

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges