Predators

I am a fan of Predator. I am also a fan of Alien Vs. Predators 2. You can toss anything else involving the Predator creatures away because the rest of it just sucks. When I read Robert Rodriguez' journal about getting El Mariachi and Desperado made, I remember reading about a treatment he once had to revitalize The Predator series. I thought it would be a good project for him. Apparently someone at FOX thought the same thing, only what, 15 years later? At this point, Rodriguez was not as interested in directing the film, but he wanted to produce it and have a say in how it went, so his Troublemaker production company took the major producing credit and Rodriguez picked Nimrod Antal to direct. Antal had previously directed 2 American, 1 excellent(Vacancy) and 1 not so excellent(Armored). I was still excited about the idea.

With a story very close to The World's Most Dangerous Game, People are set on an island and then promptly hunted. Why? Well that is never entirely clear. This particular island happens to be on another planet and the hunters happen to be crazy alien creatures. The humans are some of the most vicious killers/predators on the planet and they are not friendly. We have Royce(Adrien Brody), a former black ops military guy, Isabelle(Alice Braga) also some sort of mercenary. Then there is a Japanese mobster, a Mexican thug, Russian mercenary, Death row inmate, an African rebel and randomly a scrawny, wimpy doctor(Topher Grace), who is there seemingly just to provide us with comic relief, and maybe to patch up our humans. This band of multi colored human beings must somehow band together and stay alive against these creatures who adapt very quickly and have awesome weapons and a cloaking ability. Pretty basic stuff.

Predators is a bit too talky, but when the action gets going, it really worked for me. Too much time is spent in exposition, considering we get a crazy EXPOSITION MAN(E.M) character in the form of Laurence Fishbourne. For those of you not well versed in Kyle movie lingo. The Exposition Man character is one who exists solely to tell us what is going on. In horror movies like this, he is usually a minority and usually he is crazy. In this movie he is both. Yet even with E.M, the characters also give much expository dialog, which always brings the movie to a screeching halt. There had to be a way to have maximum amount of action, and use E.M more to give us the information we need without all of the other dialog. It is a script pet peeve of mine to have too many people explaining what is going on. One or two characters is all we need to get what is happening.

It is kind of a minor complaint because the action is totally awesome. I remember being worried that Brody was not bad ass enough to carry a picture like this, but he is. He worked out, clearly, but more importantly, Brody has always projected himself to be an actor who is always thinking and to play a Black-ops guy, he has to use that and it works completely. I believed him as a strategist and if you needed help buying the baddassery, Brody spends a majority of the movie with a giant gun in his hands. Could that be overcompensating? Maybe, but it is awesome. The weaponry all the way around is totally sick. The Predators have these cool blasters and the humans have all sorts of guns they can use to blow away the little pig like creatures in the first cool action sequence and then hopefully to kill the predators.

Predators is not a remake, or reboot, it is another movie in the canon of Predator movies. It references the original film and it is a nice addition to the world. The movie opens in this awesome moment, of someone(Broady) falling out of the sky and waking up and opening his parachute. It is a wonderfully claustrophobic moment and sets the tone perfectly. The jungle looks amazing and it is utilized well, as the characters move all over the place throughout the jungle, so we get a very good sense of geography, which is important for this type of film. The predators look great, although Megan, my movie going companion does a wicked impression of the predators and made them less scary because of it. The climatic fight between Brody and the last standing Predator is totally kick ass, but I tend to think any fight that takes place around a ring of fire, is pretty kick ass. I also enjoyed the little twist towards the end. It kind of came from nowhere, but I am sure it makes sense if you go back and watch again. It is not going to start trends in action movies, but Predators packs enough of a punch that it kept me entertained.

Final Grade: C+