Trailer
Plot summary
Jack Mason lives on the streets of Seattle, and in one day he loses his dog Mingo and Hank, the older vagrant who shares his food and roof. He tries to kill himself. Walter Cole, who works at a soup kitchen, stops him and sends him to Thomas Burns, the owner of Hell's Canyon Outfitters, who hires him as a hunting guide. Mason flies to a cabin in the wilderness and meets the men who paid $50,000 each to be there: Doc Hawkins, a retired intelligence agent and psychiatrist who founded the outfit, Texas oil magnate John Griffin, and the Wall Street Wolfes, father and son. In the morning Cole wakes him with a gun in his face and tells him the party hunts men, and that he is their prey.
Cast
- Lawrence C. McCoyas Hotel Clerk
- Jacqui Dickersonas Taxi Passenger
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Surviving the Game (1994)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- On At the Movies, Gene Siskel praised Ice-T's performance, called the film "a good B-movie for the action crowd" and gave it a thumbs up, while Roger Ebert said he could not recommend it; Siskel implored him to reconsider, noting Ebert's longstanding championing of B movies, but Ebert would not change his mind.
- The outdoor scenes are supposed to take place across the Oregon border in the U.S. Northwest, but they were filmed around Entiat and Wenatchee, Washington, with Lake Wenatchee and the Wenatchee National Forest both featured in the film.
- Entertainment Weekly's Owen Gleiberman called the film "Cliffhanger with one third the firepower", though he did praise the cinematography and singled out Ice-T for his on-screen charisma while finding him a bit unconvincing as an action star.
- The film was a box office bomb, grossing $7.7 million against a production budget of $7.4 million that did not include advertisement and distribution costs.
