Prey of Wrath (2026)

This is one Ty and I covered on the podcast, episode 273 in the archives, which was one we had to record twice, because I accidentally deleted the first one! Either way, it needed a post on the site too, so we're making it happen now. In addition to us, Chris the Brain at Bulletproof Action has covered this as well.

Prey of Wrath has Tatiana Neva as Lyudmilla Alekseyenko, a Russian special forces agent sent to the US to track down some rogue agents who absconded with some nuclear warheads. One of those agents, the ring leader, happens to be her mentor, Gray Michael Sallies (Viktor Reznikov), and the question is can she pull the trigger when it comes time to take him down? At the very least, she can't kill his innocent wife when ordered to, so that means she's going rogue too. At the same time, two CIA agents (Cynthia Rothrock and Leonard Zhang) are interested in these warheads, for obvious reasons, and when they encounter Neva, it's a question of whether or not they can trust her. Do they have a choice though, considering the alternative?

This isn't bad, and the main reason for that is Tatiana Neva. She was fantastic, great screen presence, solid martial arts, a more grounded version of Marvel's Black Widow character, which made for a great action lead. Some of the special effects, especially the greenscreen effects, revealed the film's budgetary limitation, but Neva does what a star should do, and lifts the material beyond those limitations. From there we have DTVC 40 Club member and one of the best to do it, Cynthia Rothrock, who has her own fight scene which looked great too. I think her name on the tin is what will get people to click play, and even though Neva is the one to watch, for people who tuned in for Rothrock, it's good to be rewarded. Then we have the all important runtime, and this clocks in at a cool 79 minutes, including credits, so another plus in its favor. Finally, it's free to stream on Xumo here in the States. Add that to the short runtime, an up-and-coming star and one who's already a legend, and you have yourself a fun actioner.

Usually we'd start with our film's Hall of Famer--and in this case 40 Club member--but I wanted to start with Tatiana Neva because she was so great here. I could see this character in multiple movies, but I think anything in the action genre with her as the star would work. Before this she had been playing Black Widow in some short fan movie productions, which look like they could be fun, but what I liked here was she was playing an authentic original character, one that was larger than life in the action movie sense, but more grounded than something in the superhero genre. People often ask who the next big action stars are going to be, but I think we've seen two of them here recently between Neva and Shaina West. A team-up between those two is the action movie I'd want to see. Come on Mr. Nevsky, you can make that happen, can't you? Even a Western with those two would work, and considering he has Matthias Hues on speed dial, I think we have our baddie lined up too. Even if it's not with Shaina West, after seeing what Neva can do in this film, I'm looking forward to whatever her next project is. 

Now to Rothrock, who is in her 48th film on the site, which is three ahead of Don "The Dragon" Wilson for third all time among actors, and 14 behind Gary Daniels's 62, who's in second. As I said above, this isn't a big role, but I'm okay with that, because she already has dozens of movies where she was the lead, including her own film Black Creek, and the amount of her we get in this, including the fight scene, was actually a pleasant surprise. We've seen ones like Darkness of Man where she only has a one-scene cameo, and this definitely isn't that. I don't know that it's a passing the torch to Neva kind of thing either though, and I don't know if we'll ever see that, as one, I don't think Rothrock sees her career as at that point where the torch should be passed; but two, I think it's more a matter of the torch being taken from her by mainstream actors and she's been trying to reclaim it, or at least reclaim the credit for the work she did. Every clickbait list of the "Top Female Action Stars" that doesn't have her on it, let alone at or near the top, is a reminder of that, and I don't blame her for wanting people to know about the path she blazed. So while this is Neva's movie, and she should be part of the next wave of great action stars, Rothrock's wave hasn't crested yet, which means we have a lot of other movies of hers to review, so the 50 Club is definitely on the horizon.

As you know, we have a thing for Presidential Portraits here at the DTVC. It started more unofficially, so I didn't tag them at first, which means from time to time I'll go back through our archives and find another to add--like I did recently with the Dudikoff flick Chain of Command. In this film though, instead of a possible Trump, we got a Putin, which leads to the question, does that count? The only other time this has happened as far as I know was former Mexican president Vicente Fox's portrait in Shark Attack 3 (which is know for much more than that!), but that one also had George W. Bush (plus VP Dick Cheney), so it was getting tagged regardless. The other category of these we've seen is the fictitious movie president having a portrait, like Eric Roberts in Top Gunner: America vs Russia, where we had a Roberts portrait conspicuously tacked on the wall in one of the rooms he was in. I didn't tag that one, and I think I'm going to say no on tagging this for now too, unless we get a spate of Putins or other foreign leader portraits, then I'll reconsider. Part of that is wanting to stick to American Presidents for this, at least for now; and part of that is the fact that we live on the second story, so I think I could survive any defenestration attempts should Putin get his back up about this--though to be fair, a letter from one of his aides would be more than enough to get me to tag him, hopefully precluding any attempts at defenestration, even if I'd survive the fall anyway.

Finally (that previous paragraph felt like the finally, didn't it?), this and all of Nevsky's recent films are going straight to Xumo, which is great because we can see them, but also interesting on two levels. One, IMDb doesn't list Xumo as a place where you can see something, so as far as they're concerned, this is only available to rent on Amazon for $4.99. Letterboxd does list it, and that applies to a lot of other streaming sources, so I've found it's better to go there to see if a movie's available. And two, Xumo doesn't have a search function. You think I'm fucking with you? Well I'm not fucking with you, they really don't have a search function. I know, it's 2026, and a search function would've been a prerequisite back in 1996, but they ain't got one. Usually films like this are visible on the first bar of scrolling, so you don't need to search, but still, how do you find something that's not featured? A lot of times I'll find it on Letterboxd and click the link from there. I think it was in episode 261 of the podcast where Jon Cross and I are discussing Body of Influence, which is also in Xumo, where Jon gives his theory on how he thinks Xumo ended up without a search function. It involves a group of overweight, aging, organized crime types eating greasy sandwiches and trying to cut corners while telling a young computer programmer what they want the site to look like. It makes as much sense as anything.

And with that, let's wrap this up. Xumo is the best way to go, unless you really want to go above and beyond when it comes to supporting indie films, and then you can get it on VOD on Amazon for $4.99. Tatiana Neva is the main reason to watch this, but Rothrock and the 79-minute runtime don't hurt either. and check out the podcast episode Ty and I did on this, number 273 in the archives.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13650572/