Predators Review

Predators, is a long ride. It’s like heading to your grandmother’s house in Nebraska, and you have to pass through Kansas to get there. Sometimes you’ll pass an interesting ball of twine, or a neat looking building, but ultimately you’re spending a long time going through absolutely nothing. And that’s what this film does best.

It opens with a bang. “OhmiGod! Adrian Brody is falling! OhmiGod! I hope his parachute deploys!” and within a few minutes you’ve met everyone, all of whom have been mysteriously paradropped into this mysterious jungle on this mysterious planet. From the get-go it’s predictable in terms of character development. Obviously Adrian Brody is the lead guy who makes wild leaps in logic and is complete and totally right regardless. Then you have the supporting characters. And no one cares about them. Seriously, they’re pretty uninteresting. When Topher Grace is the most interesting supporting character in an action, you may have done things wrong.

But then again this isn’t much of an action movie. You don’t see a predator for a good third to half the movie. So it’s a group of uninteresting people lead by a mercenary who always looks like he’s about to cry as they wander the jungle and keep noticing strange things. Finally there’s some action when the predators sic their preddogs on the group. It lasts for a few minutes… Then it’s back to aimlessly wandering the jungle.

We finally see predators when the group seeks out the predators’ camp. As they come across one of our “classic” predators, they’re attacked by these new predators. At this point we see what one of my biggest complaints is. The predators in this film, this brand new, shiny, new-film-smell, 2010 film, look WORSE than the one from 1987. They look more guy-in-a-rubber-suit than they did two decades ago. I understand that it’s hard to make a real prosthesis suit and film it and make it look real, but all they had to do was get Brian Steele (who played the biggest and baddest of the predators) to call up his old friend Guillermo del Toro to help out. But instead they settled with what looks like a goofy Halloween costume with a lot of money thrown at it.

After they escape these rubbery predators, they meet Laurence Fishburne’s character. There’s no doubt that he was played for comedic effect to some extent, but in reality, his character is nothing but a joke. I couldn’t take ANY of it serious. He’s supposed to be insane, but it was both annoying, and dumbtarded. He’d do things that were supposed to be taken straight-faced, but I couldn’t help but laugh. Thankfully, he explodes.

This brings us to the next complaint about our featured creatures. They’re weak. Extremely weak. There are two types of predators in the film, the “classic” we saw in ye olden days and the new “black” predators, who are bigger, stronger, harder, faster, more than ever, hour after hour, work is never over. Oops, Daft Punk’d out there. Anyway, the new predators are MUCH more not-good for your health as the old ones, and they’re also exclusively what the cast fights. And there are three of them.

In the original Predator, a group of elite commandos is taken apart one by one by a single “classic” predator. In the end, Dutch, the hero, barely manages to kill it, and even then the tough-as-nails bastard almost kills Dutch with one last trick. So here we have a whole team of men that know each other, can communicate well, and work as a cohesive unit getting reamed by a single weak predator. Flash forward two decades. You have a group of unrelated people who are individually good at killing but don’t have a unified tactic or mind. They’re killing the “black” predators single-handedly. Remember that scene in Predator where the group is moving on and Billy stays back with his knife to try and kill the predator? He got raped. Yet in this one, a yakuza member tries the same shenanigans and pulls it off, despite this newer predator being a much tougher opponent. The predators do manage to pick them off, but slowly, and ineffectively at best.

But it doesn’t particularly matter anyway; the cast isn’t something you can get attached to. Like I said earlier, the supporting characters are ridiculously weak. The main characters aren’t much better either. You have Alice Braga playing an Israeli Defense Force sniper who is pretty much a cardboard cutout, and then you have Adrian Brody as the main character. Apparently he put on 25 pounds of muscle for this role. Too bad it didn’t change the fact that every scene in which he tries to be a bad-ass has him looking like he’s welling up with tears inside that could overflow at any second. Casting fail.

On a note unrelated to the film’s actual quality, I’d like to highlight a recent trend in Hollywood, which I believe is A HORRIBLE THING. Watch the Iron Man 2 trailer. “You complete me!” says Tony as he dives out of a plane after his helmet. Not in the movie. Same thing here. The trailer shows Adrian Brody with a single tri-dot on him, quickly lit up by about fifty more of them. In the film, there’s one. A single, solitary, measly, little tri-dot on him. I find it incredibly annoying that they’re putting shit in the trailers that isn’t in the movie. It’s almost like false advertising. “See this cool thing! But not in the movie…” But anyway…

At the end of the film, I sat there for a moment trying to think what I thought of it. When it’s over, and all’s said and done, I can’t honestly say Predators is a BAD film. But it’s not a good one either. It’s a boring slog through the jungle with action scenes that don’t really pay off any action. Despite being a sequel to the original predators, it really feels like it’s a remake of the original with a modern budget. As a large fan of the original predator films, I can’t really recommend this one for fanservice either. Predators is best reserved for a rainy day when you have nothing to do and an extra ten-spot in your pocket.