Predators (’10 review)

4 out of 5

Predator is one of those rare, sturdy 80s Arnold Schwarzenegger action movies that hasn’t really dated at all. Predator 2 was just … less.  Not terrible, but nowhere near as well-made.  The two Alien vs. Predator movies are mediocre at best, and calling them “mediocre” is generous.  So one would assume that the franchise would be completely out of steam this time around but that happily isn’t so.  Predators is easily the best Predator movie in over 20 years. It’s actually a somewhat astonishing that in the 5^th go-around with this creature they managed to wring out a great flick.  It just took a really long time.

A military man (Adrien Broody) is dropped from the sky onto an alien planet, where he encounters a sniper (Alice Braga), a Yakuza assassin (Louis Ozawa Changchien), a drug cartel mobster (Danny Trejo), a wimpy doctor (Topher Grace), and a few other fodder characters (one of them has the same mini-gun that Jessie the Body Ventura had in Predator).  They eventually realize that they are on a game reserve, being hunted by three Predators – alien creatures that kill sentient beings for sport.  Eventually the humans run into a survivor, Noland (Laurence Fishburne) who tells them there’s no chance of escape, success, and survival looks unlikely.

The characters aren’t overflowing with depth, but Brody makes a surprisingly calloused lead, Braga seems pretty tough for such a diminutive figure, and while Grace may annoy some viewers, I at least thought he was funny and he has a cool exit.  Fishburne is barely in the film long enough to lay down some exposition, but it’s really fun to see him play a guy completely out of his skull, considering it seems for about a decade now Fishburne has been doing variations upon Morpheus from The Matrix.

Predators is an entirely self-contained film requiring no previous knowledge of the franchise.  The only reference to the previous continuity is a single effectively delivered speech by Braga that recounts the events of the first film. However, the movie is awash with stylistic nods to the first film, straddling the line between homage and direct rip off.  The multi-ethnic cast defined by a distinct character tic is back. The Predators are held back in the trees for the first 40 minutes, watching through heat vision.  The climatic battle between man and Predator is a bit close to the climatic battle between Arnold and Predator. The music is basically a copy and paste job of Alan Silvestri’s score from Predator, but that’s okay because the original score was amazing.  There’s even a moment when a character decides to face down a Predator mano-a-mano like one character did in Predator and the score is exactly the same.

Compared to modern blockbusters, this film was made with a relatively small budget so the otherworldly world isn’t all that otherworldly.  This planet is definitely not Pandora from Avatar.  Aside from one random alien and some alien dog monsters, the Predator planet is sparely populated. But this does mean the film relies more on models, physical props, and guys in Predator suits.   This movie reveals there are two different species of Predator, with the new Predator getting a slight redesign.  While the redone Predator is cool, it simply doesn’t look as iconic as Stan Winston’s original. The first Predator is in the movie too, and it leads a nu-Predator vs. classic Predator fight that is nifty, but the new bad guy basically wipes the floor with the original.  This is a fairly standard trick to make a new bad guy seem badass by kicking the crap out of the villain from the previous movie.  

But the reason the movie clicks is energy of the set pieces, and a breakneck pace with lots of different types of action.   The opening is Brody waking up in the middle of a freefall which certainly gets the audience’s attention. Throughout the film, Director Nimrod Antal gets to play up confined spaces and the invisible enemy.   It adds a lot more deadliness to the Predators that wore off after a couple of sub-par sequels.  Also, this movie has some pretty shockingly quick deaths, which reinforces the brutality of the creatures.  The script itself, based upon an unmade script producer Robert Rodriquez (Sin City) wrote over a decade ago, is curt action movie writing, like the original was. These people don’t exactly talk much, but when they do it’s to the point and sometimes funny. 

Yes, reboots and endless sequels are a symptom of Hollywood creative bankruptcy.  But it doesn’t mean franchise filmmaking is a complete dead-end.  Like last year’s Star Trek, Predators is a good example of invigorating a franchise by simply just making a zippy, effective action flick.  It doesn’t have the layers that Star Trek did, but Predators twists moments from the original for all audiences. Well, “all audiences” that enjoy spines being ripped out, that is.