Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
8/4/10
A great
sequel is a joy to behold. But let's be honest: most franchises
are about hype rather than results. As such, like that guy or girl
you really shouldn't be in a relationship with, they spend an awful lot
of time apologizing and swearing that this time things will be different.
And so you get sequel whiplash, with franchises snapping back and forth
between light and dark, epic and stripped-down, reinvented and back-to-basics
trying to get you to buy one more ticket. And it is easy to talk
those games because, like jilted lovers, we WANT to believe we'll get another
fix of what made us fall in love with the property in the first place.
What's hard is to actually deliver. John McTiernan's iconic 1987
Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle Predator combined 80's action and
50's monster movie motifs with a success that whipped geeks into a frenzy,
but as Predators hits multiplexes as the 5th movie to feature the
human-hunting aliens it introduced, it's struggling to become just the
second to achieve widespread popularity (for the record, I thought Predator
2 was actually pretty cool and Alien vs. Predator wasn't half
bad either). The filmmakers have spent a lot of time assuring us
they're back to basics, and indeed Predators has far more superficially
in common with the original than any previous sequel. Problem is,
the movie plays much more like an empty chalk outline of Predator
than a legitimate story of its own. While there's nothing much wrong
with Nimrod Antal's third feature, there's also very little right with
it. Unwilling to take chances, Predators establishes a tone
of cliched tough-guy “realism” and rides it for a hair under two hours,
never becoming particularly exciting or involving. Save for a few
name stars, this is indistinguishable from the direct-to-video Predator
knockoffs that have littered the Sci-Fi Channel for years.
Nine
people awaken in mid-air with parachutes strapped their backs. Eight
survive the fall into a mysterious jungle and quickly turn to mercenary
Royce (Adrien Brody) to lead them. He wants to get to higher
ground and assess their situation. What they find there is not good:
a sky full of suns, planets and moons that means they're not in Kansas
anymore. A booby-trapped field leading to a man horribly killed,
a mad pack of alien “dogs” sent to flush them out, and finally the revelation
of an “invisible” armored hunter pursuing them: Royce correctly guesses
that they've all been selected for transport to this alien planet so the
Predators could hunt them. Indeed, they are all dangerous people,
except for Doctor Edwin (Topher Grace), who's watched out for first by
Russian soldier Nikolai (Oleg Taktarov) and then his American counterpart
Isabelle (Alice Braga). One by one, the human prey is picked off
by the three-creature hunting party, briefly taking shelter with mad survivor
Noland (Laurence Fishburne), who's endured hunt after hunt and watched
the aliens adapt each time to the lessons of the last. Royce hatches
a crazy plan to hijack the Predator shuttle back to Earth, but to succeed,
he'll need an inside man... or beast.
The
Predators screenplay by Alex Litvak & Michael Finch assembles
a dream team of International Hard-Asses, with drug cartel enforcers, Yakuza,
serial killers and ethnic cleansers mixed in with assorted soldiers and
mercenaries. While they may be correct to assume that all these assorted
types would deal with the Predator menace in much the same way-running
for their lives-that approach does little to validate our decision to buy
a ticket. We learn little about the characters and even less about
the Predators. And you can't even call realism on that one because,
as in the original Alien vs. Predator, before the credits roll our
human hero will have had a ludicrously unbelievable charades-flavored conversation
with one of his alien counterparts. A big part of what made the original
Predator special is that it assembled one of the craziest casts
ever, with two future governors, the former Apollo Creed and screenwriter
Shane Black among those taking on the creature, and outfitted them with
weaponry from some Guns & Ammo subscriber's acid trip.
Realism was not a Predator strong suit, and trying to “gritty up”
the proceedings sends Predators down the wrong road pretty much
throughout.
Because
the cast of characters is made up almost entirely of criminals, rooting
interest is hard to come by. Brody does a great job transforming
himself into a tough guy killing machine (I was reminded of the similarly
improbable performance given by James Spader at the center of the similarly
crappy Supernova), but Royce's primary trait is that he doesn't
much care about anything. Grace does all he can to make us pull for
Edwin, but you just know that guy must be up to something, and when it's
revealed, it's probably the least interesting possibility. Braga
is positioned to be the movie's conscience, but she makes Isabelle come
off as more of a nag. Probably the most likable character is Taktarov's
Russian soldier, and Groggins' psycho killer is fun to have around because
of his total lack of a filter provides the movie's only laughs. Fishburne,
a fine actor who should know better, is just dreadful in his glorified
cameo as the nutcase Noland, who talks to an invisible friend and generally
acts all crazy for a couple scenes. The movie's most intriguing character
is offscreen: Ernest Hemingway offers up a fascinating quote about
the thrill of man hunting man, attributed to him only after Isabelle offers
up that most tiresome of movie segues: “Did you make that up by yourself?”
I dream of the day when someone simply answers “Yes. Yes, I did.”
Like
the heroes, the Predators have surprisingly few new tricks up their sleeves.
The “dogs” are kinda cool, and Antal shoots the attack sequence for maximum
danger. There's a single inspired fight scene, where Yakuza Hanzo
(Louis Ozawa Changchien) engages a Predator in a de factor swordfight in
the middle of a moonlit field of swaying grass, and this sequence teases
the movie that could have been. Other than that, it's mostly
more of the same. Given the unlikable nature of most of the characters,
the violence is pretty tame. You'd think the movie would at least
take advantage of our lack of concern for their safety to really maul the
hell out of them, but only one guy gets dispatched with a memorable flourish.
Royce doesn't just rip off the climax of the original movie at the end,
but does so because Isabelle told him about its events in an earlier scene.
There's a lot of vague talk of other creatures being hunted as well, but
nothing ever comes of it. The closing shot offers an intriguing sequel
possibility or two, at least until you think about how it means Noland's
endless isolation on the planet was probably closer to two weeks than ten
years. Dude goes from zero to imaginary friend FAST.
Like
many a sequel (and most fivequels), Predators is more about getting
anything Predator-related in front of a camera than telling a story that
would stand apart from its franchise roots. And you can't deny it
does just that. And those forced to sit through Aliens
vs. Predator: Requiem will be happy to see neither Aliens nor
The Brothers Strauss on hand. But what we get here is simply filler,
a sad suggestion that what franchise fans are really looking for is more
of the same, only less so. Jilted again. |
