Predators Review

Director: Nimrod Antal

Adrien Brody – Royce | Topher Grace - Edwin | Alice Braga – Isabelle | Walton Goggins - Stans | Oleg Taktarov – Nikolai | Laurence Fishburne – Noland | Danny Trejo – Cuchillo | Louis Ozawa Changchien -Hanzo | Mahershalalhashbaz Ali – Mombasa | Carey Jones – Berserker Predator / Tracker Predator / Falconer Predator | Brian Steele - Black Super Predator / Falconer Super Predator | Derek Mears – Classic Predator

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This film excited me with trailers and hype and my own anticipation.

Then I saw it.

Now?

Now I just want to watch the original and remind myself of what it was like to have a great Predator film.

When I first read Robert Rodriguez was doing the next Predator film I was sure the franchise would be in safe hands. He’s an accomplished director with a distinctive style and no stranger to hugely creative and over-the-top gun fights (guitar case rocket launcher!). As it turned out, Rodriguez wrote and produced the film with directorial duty handed over to the curiously named Nimrod Antal. Still, Rodriguez wrote it so not too much to worry about.

Then, after reading a three star review of the film on Empire’s website my excitement (and expectation) was curbed a little but I was still convinced I’d see a worthy rebirth and/or advancement of a franchise that had captured the imaginations of viewers and had an established universe thanks to some fantastic novels (‘Prey’, ‘Hunter’s Planet’ & ‘War’) yet had been criminally short-changed in the TERRIBLE Aliens Vs. Predator films.

Sadly, Empire was right. Predators is utterly unambitious and sits squarely in the exact same ‘fun-mindless-action-watch-once-and-forget’ genre of cinema occupied by its AvP forebears. It’s by no means as bad a film as either of the AvPs but it is big disappointment for anyone expecting originality or, at the very least, some development of the Predators culture and character.

While AvP took my excitement,  folded it into a towel and beat me with it, Predators instead took my excitement and gently placed it to one side while repeatedly reminding me over and over and over and OVER AGAIN how much better the original was and how this film is nothing but a huge fan of it. It got so infuriating that, by half-way through I was wondering how Rodriguez and Antal could be so utterly shameless in repeatedly ripping off the John McTiernan-helmed original.

When the film starts and (what sounds like) the original Alan Silvestri-penned score from the ’87 classic kicks in, you’re taken straight back to the forbidding cloying jungle atmosphere. This is a great callback to the original, but when you’re more than halfway through the film’s 106 minute runtime and still convinced the original score has been copied & pasted wholesale the novelty value disappears and just seems like a frugal (lazy) way of saving a few bob on a composer. Apparently a different composer is involved (John Debney) and has created new music for the film, but if all it takes to be a Hollywood composer is a PC, a copy of Pro Logic Audio and pressing the Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V keys, then hell, I’M a Hollywood composer. Even if this new score IS different, it’s just too closely modelled on the original to stand on its own.

In fact, you know what? Just watch the original.

At best this 2010 ‘sequel’ seems more like an early draft of the original before it was fine-tuned and had steroids liberally pumped into it. Steroids may be bad for the health, but 80′s film scripts were awesome because of the knowingly over-the-top hulking bodies that lumped around in them killing and wise cracking their way to box office success.

When a film is so in love with its own heritage that at least 50% of it is a straight-up remake and the other half is nowhere near as memorable as that source material you have to question what the point of making the thing was in the first place, and who greenlighted what is essentially an inferior tribute act.

I won’t go into full-on rant mode and list exhaustively the similarities and, at times, shameless plundering from the original film, but here’s a few of the main offenders:

• ‘spiritual’ bloke #1  ’senses’ a cloaked predator in the trees and stares upward transfixed until someone snaps him out of it. Cut to Predator’s heat vision staring back at them invisibly.
• muscular guy has a minigun
• spiritual bloke #2 stops, turns around, ditches top half of clothes, draws blade & awaits honourable one-on-one battle with Predator
• there is another ‘chopper’ to get to.
• hispanic woman knows more than she lets on initially and eventually spills the a mass of back story to the mystified men
• muscular mud-covered leader bloke has climactic hand-to-hand battle of primal manliness with Mr. Super Predator (yes, they really called it a ‘Super Predator’).
• Mac’s whispered “Turn around” and “Over here” lines are unfathomably reused (no logical reason for this other than mindless homage)

And so the list drags on (and on) to the point where it’s so distracting it’s more like spot the ‘homage’ which just takes you out of the film completely. There are, however, brief interludes that could be rays of light where Rodriguez & Antal aren’t yelling about how amazing the original film is and instead provide originality and their own telling of the story. So what happens in these bits?

Not much.

Where the original was full of cheesy marine characters that all had distinct personalities, one-liners, muscles, sweat and a relatively believable set-up & double cross this version has nothing of note. The original team of military types were all ‘good guys’ who’d gone into Guatemala on a search & rescue mission for missing comrades. They took out an entire village of bad guys before being picked of by the Predator, therefore we actually rooted for them to survive and the film made us care when someone was taken out by how the team-mates reacted to it.

The characters in Predators are, with a couple of exceptions, all utter bastards that we want to see dead. Death row rapist inmate? South African death squad warlord? Mexican drug cartel enforcer? Yakuza member? Why should we give two shits about these guys? We shouldn’t. So it’s all down to the torture-porn nature of how they meet their creative demise.

That, at least, delivers some great & gory dispatchings of these guys but there’s no emotional impact. They were bastards, they deserved to die.

And, in the case of the death row inmate there was a moment of absolutely squirm-inducing scripting. Where he’s considering what he’ll do if he escapes, he says “I’m gonna rape so many bitches”. That line right there, I hated it. Maybe someone thought it was needed so we don’t become too fond of this guy, but the reaction of the guy he says it to is a laugh moment for the audience. That made me feel very uneasy. Then, when this guy is about to die later on, he makes a dramatic last stand, jumping on the back of a Predator and attempts to stab it to death. The rapist is given a hero’s last stand that actually makes you want to root for him. He does, of course get OWNED by the Predator and has his spinal column & skull removed quicksmart for his trouble, but that whole sequence made me feel very uncomfortable.

Lawrence Fishburn shows up in his new fat suit (oh, wait… that’s not a suit) as a loony survivor who serves ZERO purpose apart from to give some exposition on what’s going on and where they are. He’s then taken out in an appropriately inglorious manner which makes you wonder how he survived long enough to claim and use the Predator mask, cloaking device and rifle he brandishes (and which disappear off into the ether, never to be seen again).

While Adrien Brody may well have employed Christian Bale’s Batman voice coach to learn ’Generic Husky Growl #1′ anyone who’s seen the original will be able to remember most of the set-piece deaths and most of the eminently quotable script (“I ain’t got time to bleed”, “If it bleeds, we can kill it” , “You’re one ugly motherfucker” etc…).

In this film there is literally not a SINGLE memorable line. Maybe the problem is trying to make a sequel to a classic film that’s still fun and quoted 23 years after it was made. Maybe you just can’t escape the shadow of such an iconic picture? The much maligned (and, in my opinion, underrated) Predator 2 at least has its own identity, developed the premise (and the weaponry) and moved the action to the city in a credible way. The set up to this film literally drops from the sky in what Roger Ebert describes hilariously (and accurately) as:

“the first film in history to open with a deus ex machina. Yes, the entire plot and all the human characters drop into the movie from the heavens. The last thing they remember is a blinding flash of light. Now they’re in free fall, tumbling toward the surface, screaming, grabbing for ripcords on the parachutes that they didn’t know they had.”

Waking up plummeting to the surface of an alien planet is a great way to just jump into the action without having to set anything up, but in doing so we have no connection with the characters. Would it have been so bad to have a 1-2 minute back story for each person, showing where they were & what they were doing prior to their abduction?

Where the original had snatches of funny interaction in the helicopters en route to the jungle that established relationships and characters this has a bunch of people thrown together who you literally don’t care one way or the other what happens to them. Even the main guy Royce is a cold loner from the start, lacking the confident leadership and trust of his team and 95% of the charisma that Arnie had in the role.

And, say what you will about Arnie’s acting skills, but he was MADE for that role (well, that and the Terminator). Minimal talking, maximum bicep badassery. Adrien Brody is not even on the same planet (literally and figuratively) as Major Dutch Schaefer. And, by the way Adrien, soldiers don’t look like fitness models. You didn’t need to get ripped to be credible. You are a skinny guy and look ridiculous all blown up like a balloon with a six pack. In fact, don’t take roles that involve being ripped and shooting things. We’ve got Jason Statham and Gerard Butler for that, and at least they provide their gruff voices with comically bad American accents.

This film is adds nothing to the Predator story or universe; it’s entirely unneccessary. We learn nothing new.

Actually, no,  that’s not entirely true. We do encounter a captured Predator who looks just like the creature from the first film (credited as the ‘Classic Predator). Naturally, this Predator was almost invincible right to the last minute of the first two films so I assumed him being tied up was some sort of trap and wondered how it’s going to trick these silly meatbag humans, while preparing myself for a shocking ‘jump’ moment where he jerks awake and stares at them.

The shock happens, as predictably as it’s setup but, alas, the trap has been set by a different species of Predator. You see, the Predator who was such a badass in the first film is actually the weaker of the Predator species. So, the creature that so terrified and fascinated us all those years ago is actually on a similar social level in their culture as a 7-year-old Victorian chimney sweep would be in ours, spending most of the film hanging limply from a rock like a string of sausages going off in the sun.

What a fantastic way to establish a new, more terrifying villain you may think.

Nope.

What a fantastic way to kill off the mystique of one of the iconic cinema monsters on the 20th century. The Aliens Vs. Predator arcade introduced the races of Predator idea but they divided it logically into two roles; Hunter and Warrior:

In a videogame they managed to instantly establish two distinct races of a species without putting in an arbitrary ‘class war’ story that goes nowhere and just weakens the supposed ‘honour’ the race is supposed to have. As a side note, they even put Arnie’s Major Dutch Schaefer from the original film as a playable character (albeit it with a ‘cyborg’ story, but it’s him!).

The Linn Kurosawa character also seems to be Machiko Noguchi from the novels with a different name and a similar cyborg thing going on. They sure like their cyborgs back then.

Anyway, back to the review…

I know the Batman analogy is all played out and a massive cliché but there was a Batman vs. Predator crossover comic so the comparison isn’t that inappropriate; Tim Burton’s 1989 version of Batman was awesome when it came out and remained a critical & commercial success (and was the first 12 rated film I saw at the cinema, aged 11!). Then, years later, Christopher Nolan gave us Batman Begins which blew it away and left it looking a bit camp and foolish like a man standing in front of a crowd in just his vest & pants. Then, the The Dark Knight was released and made Batman Begins look inferior. It built on an already great film in every way and was a better film in every way.

THAT’S what a sequel should do. Unfortunately, Nimrod Antal and Robert Rodriguez have had the ‘Reverse Nolan’ effect on Predator; they make you realize how much better the original was.

I left the cinema knowing I’d go home & re watch Arnie many more times but probably never watch Brody ever again.

And finally,  if like me, you’d prefer to forget the AvP  films happened, either read the crossover books I mentioned at the start of this review or download MAME (Multiple Arcade Emulator) and find a ROM of the Aliens Vs. Predator arcade game from the 90′s. There’s fun in that than both films put together.