I just saw Predators, and it wasn’t the worst movie I’ve ever seen. That makes two movies in the Predator series that I didn’t hate. Maybe two out of three ain’t bad. On the other hand, if I’m going to drop ten bucks on a movie, pretty good just ain’t good enough.

In traditional man-as-prey fashion and along the lines of Richard Connel’s seminal work The Most Dangerous Game (1924) and Surviving the Game (Ice-T and Rutger Hauer, 1994), Predators explores what happens when our human tactics, our sensibilities, and our lust for the hunt are turned against us. The movie begins with a visually compelling free-fall but lands with a by-the-numbers thud; in the middle, we get the usual band of disposable multiethnic characters who get picked off one by one while the hero super-soldier gets away, gets the girl, and gets to negotiate a higher salary for the inevitable sequel (to this already unnecessary sequel to an already unnecessary sequel).

The original Predator got it right and told the story that needed to be told, and this movie proves it. This effort is mostly right out of the Alien Stalker Movies for Dummies playbook. You can easily imagine the writers sitting around the conference table, running through their checklist, contriving it all from start to finish. “Okay, we’ve got our gruff-voiced white über-leader, our fiery Israeli-Latina chick, our huge African with an accent, our scary-looking Mexican, a Russian soldier, a silent Japanese assassin, and we’ve got the weasely mass-murdering opportunist for comic relief. What’s missing? Oh, yeah! A quiet wild card guy who will be revealed as something other than what he seems.

“And… check.”

We’ve seen all these characters a million times in a million similar movies. Only Adrien Brody as Royce stands out as a new face in an old crowd, and he probably wasn’t the best casting choice. He’s a beaky pencil-neck with painted-on abs. He grunts his lines with squinty detachment like Clint Eastwood reading movie taglines: “We were all brought here for the same purpose. This planet is a game preserve, and we're the game.” I didn’t buy him for a second as a natural leader of a rag-tag band of criminals and mercenaries. Plus, his right nostril is enormous, and I kept thinking he was going to inhale my popcorn.

At one point, in an effort to introduce an element of originality, the team of humans speculates that perhaps they’re in hell. While not actually original -- basically, it’s Lost but with a Rastafarian smoke monster and an hour and a half instead of six years to tell the story -- it’s the most interesting thing that almost happens in the movie, but is served up fast and abandoned faster. Then it’s back to being by the book. It’s like a puppet show where you can see the strings.


The ultimate question from the original remains: “Who is the real predator?” Flipping the predator-prey relationship on its head lets us see ourselves, the deadliest predators in the non-fiction universe, in a new light. Indeed, the best parts of the movie are those that are straight out of the original -- the thumping jungle music, the Predator’s click-howls and predilection for picking everyone up by the neck, a guy with a Gatling gun blasting blindly into the trees, complex forest snares, the Predator’s whispered voice imitations, the bare-chested hero running around mud-crusted against a backdrop of pyrotechnics, and “Long Tall Sally,” this time played over the end credits. Despite some new stuff (mediocre CGI rhino-dogs, and a single matte painting of space to show us that we’re not on Earth), Predators is more of a re-make than a sequel or a re-boot. Either way, it’s enough like the original to make me wonder if it’s a movie that had to be made at all.

The potential was there. They could have told the story from the Predators’ point of view. Or shown us more about their motivations, personalities, and vulnerabilities. Instead, we get three seconds of a budding human-Predator relationship, but just when things are looking up, the Predator’s head winds up on the ground twenty feet away from his body. This movie leaves a lot of philosophical questions (Why hunt for sport?) unasked and a lot of logistical questions (What the heck happened to those other Predators in the end?) unanswered; not to mention to big unsolved mystery of how jabbering loon Nolan (Laurence Fishburne) managed to live in a hole in the jungle for “ten seasons,” evade the Predators and explore the entire planet, and yet still look like the Pillsbury Doughboy.

This series has been a disappointing ride, from the highs of the great 1987 McTiernan classic to the depths of Predator 2 and the unfortunate Alien crossovers, and then to… this. I have long wanted to leap from the moving franchise and roll away to die on the side of the road, and this movie doesn’t exectly inspire me to hop back on board.

And where do you go from here, anyway? The Predator series has been done to death, dug up, and done to death all over again. So what’s left? A lavish musical? A romantic comedy with Adrien Brody as the polished man of culture and Whoopi Goldberg as his Predator bride? A political thriller with Arnold coming out of retirement to duke it out with an illegal alien challenger in a battle to the death for supremacy of California?

Okay, that, I’d watch.

  -- Malcolm Matthews

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Further Reading

Geek VS Geek
    ♦ AVP: The Case for the Predator by Malcolm Matthews
    ♦ AVP: The Case for the Alien by William Cashin

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