Liberties can and should be taken when adapting a work of literary fiction into something cinematic. In the case of “The Most Dangerous Game,” liberties might be a necessity, unless one was making a short film out of a short story. Richard Connell’s verbose, darkly witty, and suspenseful tale of the ultimate battle of wits, which entered the public domain in 2020, is quite short, and to adapt it into a feature, writer/director Justin Lee has gone the route of exceptional liberty by adding characters, moving plot developments around and expanding others, and shifting the action into the era following World War II (instead of after the Russian Revolution, as that particular war had not occurred yet in the world Connell inhabited). Unfortunately, only the change of setting, which in theory brings about an even more vicious antagonist, really works in this version of The Most Dangerous Game.
After all, the events that led to the Second World War gave us Nazis, meaning that the villain here was one of Adolf Hitler’s minions before the fall of his Reich. After the war, Baron Von Wolf (Casper Van Dien) found himself an island and, like the General Zaroff of the story, decided to set up a system of determining which species was the apex predator. The idea of hunting humans similarly happens with a gradual build toward what, exactly, Von Wolf would like to hunt next. The movie otherwise keeps its protagonist’s name, Sanger Rainsford (Christopher Tamburello), but also gives him a different background – that of a veteran sharpshooter in the same war in which Von Wolf fought on the opposing side, rather than simply a skilled big-game hunter.
To watch Lee’s adaptation is to play a game of one’s own: combing through the narrative presented here to see what alterations have been made to fit within a much longer frame. We begin on a similar note with characters (including Bruce Dern’s Whitney, who refreshingly retains the characteristics of his literary counterpart) discussing the nature of the hunted vs. the hunters, but then the movie provides the invented characters of Sanger’s father Marcus (Judd Nelson) and popular newspaper man Rex Alan (Randy Charach) as initial companions following Whitney’s exit from the story. Since the movie eventually and definitively splits Sanger from these two in order to start the story properly, this gamble doesn’t really work.
There are also two other captives on Von Wolf’s island, the sibling pair of Mary (Elissa Dowling) and Quin (Edward Finlay), who serve no purpose other than padding (though Mary also provides a reason for the film to end on an entirely unsatisfying note that loses the original story’s ingenious final note). Meanwhile, Tom Berenger shows up as a former “contestant” in Von Wolf’s game who managed to trick the baron into believing he was dead, which one might remember actually happens through the actions of the protagonist in the story. Changes like these only call attention to themselves, especially since Von Wolf’s dog-like Russian bodyguard Ivan (Kevin Porter) has lost nothing in translation.
It might seem unfair to harp on about the differences between an adaptation and its source material, but since Connell’s story was stripped to the marrow, with every word serving a specific purpose, the flourishes of Lee’s attempt to expand upon it come across as unnecessary. Tamburello, meanwhile, is a dullard in the lead role of Sanger, meaning that Van Dien can only offer the weirdest possible performance as the villain, adopting a dialect that seems more like a mixture of Eastern Europe and somewhere in South America and failing to make much of a meal with his scenes. The Most Dangerous Game is a wasted opportunity.
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