Certain Prey

Painful. One of the worst screenplays ever written. The acting is not much better. The entire film is a caricature, an excruciating attempt at modern film noir that fails from the opening frames.

From the cheesy, Sam Spade-esque voice-overs, to the excessively cliché dialog, to the ridiculous costumes (the deputy police chief wears panty hose over his head while breaking and entering, as does the assassin.)

Once you understand you're watching a terrible movie, you can almost laugh at how awful everything is. Honestly, this should have been a comedy.

Unless you enjoy pain, this is an easy pass.

I came across this pretty much by accident. I don't get the channel that made this TV movie, and as a huge fan of Davenport/Sandford, I eventually went to great lengths to get a copy. By then I had seen the reviews and pictures here and they had lowered my expectations. In fact, I even waited a couple of weeks to view it. I think many of the complaints of this film come from the unmistakable fact that a TV movie will never be better than a Sandford novel, and even more so for an audience that enjoys reading.

I also think this is one of the real strengths of this film. Mark Harmon and company didn't try to give us our vision of Davenport, he gave us his. All of the characters in the film represent an image that is similar to the book series, but also unique, and the villains are exceptionally well played. In the end, it works well and stands on its own merits. I really enjoyed this TV version of Sandford and hope there are more. This is good TV.

I find myself agreeing with some of the other reviews in that this is a decent enough adaptation of the tenth of John Sandford (John Camp's) novels and as such it attempts to try and interlace a lot of storyline into the video that fans of the books will understand. It is about as good a job of the gritty storyline that you'll be able to find on commercial TV. Sandford writes some excellent, gripping and gruesome stories more suited for cable or the big screen ...which is really where I would enjoy seeing more of his fine work. Harmon did fair but like others I found him wanting. Davenport is a big, tough and mean character that the bad guys are truly afraid of for good reason. An ex hockey player well over 6' with a brooding character that women love. Harmon isn't the right choice although I liked his effort. A much better choice would have been Russell Crowe, Ray Liotta or Nick Nolte. The two lead women did a great job pulling off the roles of Carmen and Clara but for the buxom Marcy a far better choice would have been the beautiful and moody Jennifer Connelly. Granted, my cast would have driven the costs of this up a lot ...probably far more than any made for TV effort. Hey guys, don't knock it. Any Sandford book that makes it to the screen is worth watching. Maybe not as good as they could have been but...

I actually enjoyed this movie a fair bit, as a reasonable representation of the book story. I'm about to read the sequel book to Certain Prey book 10, Mortal Prey book 13, so I thought it'd be neat to watch this movie, which I accidentally discovered on google while searching for a physical copy of Certain Prey, which as it happens, is one of my favourite Davenport Novels so far (and Winter Prey).

Harmon didn't 100% fit the image of Davenport, that said. But he did a fair job at the attempt. I am pretty sure Weather Karkinnen was supposed to be the redhead at the beginning? But I dunno? If so, bad representation. But meh.

I loved the actress that played Marcy. She probably didn't have the breasts we get described in the books, but that didn't matter. Loved her personality. Beautiful woman, with oddly perfect white teeth. Loved the scene with her and Carmel Loan in each others face in the office.

I really loved the portrayal of Clara Rinker as well. I thought she fit very well in the role. Loved her dance with Lucas (though I'm pretty sure Lucas danced better in the book? Not that I had a visual, but I thought I recalled him dancing decent).

I think this is about the best you'll get for a TV Movie to be honest. I didn't even plan to watch it. I was just going to skip around and see if it resembled the book and be done (because book movies are usually utter crap). But nope, I oddly enjoyed this. You may not.

From what I remember it seems to follow the book pretty decent. There is a lot of dialogue taken directly from the book. I'd give this a higher rating, but it's still just a TV movie and could have been better in a lot of ways. The car shootout ending could have been better for instance, but was kinda TV cheesy. But that IS how it happened in the book as I recall. So no complaints on accuracy.

After what was a disappointing start, Certain Prey settled into a comfortable watch for the evening. The initial acting was stiff and apart from Mark Harmon and Lola Glaudini, the cast were generally underwhelming. The script improved as the movie progressed and thankfully the plot in which 2 women commit a series of murders was better than expected. The only thing I truly disliked was the narrative by Harmon during the movie which explained too much from the book. It was uneccessarily distracting and quite annoying. All in all I'm glad I tuned in to watch Harmon in something other than NCIS.