A Bengal tiger runs wild in a small town. The tiger has some kind of psychic connection to a sleepwalking boy, but that doesn’t stop it from being a maneater. That causes issues for the town’s sheriff, Gary Busey, but he gets help from that hunter dude from the original Jumanji film. It’s the fourth film in SyFy’s Maneater series, even though it is literally named Maneater and should have been the first one.
Most of the Maneater films are packed with subpar CGI but Maneater wants none of that PlayStation mumbo jumbo. It features real tigers as the titular maneater, however, even though tigers are big and scary, their presence in a few scenes doesn’t save the film from being really boring.
Usually, Gary Busey is a real-life tiger in his films. Full of energy and craziness. Here, it looks like he took a bunch of ambien before every shooting every scene. He is running on about 2% Busey. That actually goes for everyone in this film. There is an obvious danger, a tiger is running loose, but everyone seems to be just too tired to be frightened.
There are a few cool scenes with the real tiger but not enough to save the film from being a dud. If Busey couldn’t even feign interest in he was standing in front of the damn tiger in real life, what the hell are we supposed to do with this?
