Covert operative-turned-family man Derek Leigh (Maxwell Caulfield) leads the good life. Having shunned busting drug cartels, he now spends his time on menial construction gigs, his dorky family and harvesting quite the porn-star mustache. But when Bandera (Trevor Goddard, 1995’s Mortal Kombat), a criminal he helped put behind bars, makes a prison break and slaughters his fam in payback, ol’ Derek again turns to kickin’ villain booty.
The style in which he does so, however, sets Prey of the Jaguar apart fron your standard, direct-to-video revenge thriller. Caulfield consults an Asian kung-fu master (John Fujioka, American Ninja) for training, purchases a crossbow and dart guns, and dons a homemade costume to become a superhero named — pause for dramatic effect — The Jaguar.
Hobbling along in plastic, smeared face paint and ViewMaster goggles, he looks like RoboCop costumed by TG&Y. Sharing a trait with Caulfield’s Grease 2 character, The Jaguar’s also a cool rider, scouting about town on a sleek black motorcycle, even though this film doesn’t have the budget to fill the Kawasaki Ninja with gas so we can see it move.
Caulfield gives an expertly poor performance as the unwitting, yet comfortably quick-quipping crimefighter. When Leigh informs his Remo Williams-esque mentor that (in so many words) his to-buy list will be much, much shorter this Christmas, he hugs a punching bag and collapses into unconvincing sobs. Then there’s the matter of the hard-to-swallow dialogue, too, like when Jag confronts his nemesis’ henchman:
Jaguar: “Tell Bandera he better learn to pray, because now he is!”
Henchie: “What?”
Jaguar: “Prey!”
Prey of the Jaguar trots out all the clichés; among them, the enemy who makes a bullseye in darts just as he vows to kill the hero, and the inevitable good-guy-saved-when-bad-guy-gets-shot-in-the-back-by-surprise-supporting-character climax. It also trots out the inexplicable, like a ponytailed Stacy Keach cameo or an ultra-secret government spy agency running reports on a dot-matrix printer.
In the hands of hack director David DeCoteau (Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama), Prey cannot be taken seriously, not even when it offs the protagonist’s wife and kid. The setup and credit sequence scream “syndicated TV movie,” while Caulfield jumping around (subbed in part by obvious stunt doubles with longer hair) like a Ritalin kid on Halloween is the nail in the credibility coffin.
Following other Z-level DTV heroes like Black Scorpion and The Demolitionist, this Jaguar is another dumb-fun example of why superhero movies are tough to tackle without tens of millions of dollars. —Rod Lott