Let me get one little spoiler (though there are more below), and one hugely wasted opportunity, out of the way: Predators does not end with my hombre Danny Trejo, straggly hair flying in the wind like the dreadlocked Predators, as the last man standing. Not even with a giant machete in hand. I’m sorry. I don’t think you readers can tell how profoundly disappointed I am about this.
Otherwise, what you do get is a perfectly decent summer popcorn flick with enough hardware and hokum to keep fanboys like me happy. There are elements of “Lost” – a bunch of strangers, plunked down into a jungle, slowly discovering they’re there for, shall we say, an unearthly reason – the required references to John McTiernan’s Predator*, Richard Connell’s “The Most Dangerous Game,” and the liberal use of radioactive-looking green sap. Nimrod Antal plays out the initial mystery for all its worth, though none of it is any surprise; I was happy while it lasted nonetheless. Plus there’s a scene of such epic, “you-can’t-be-fucking-serious” insanity – let’s say that it involves a tattooed yakuza, a shiny suit, and an actual goddamn samurai sword – to rival the showdown in the last two minutes of The Devil’s Rejects.
The fact that our protagonists are a hilariously motley crew of killers is proof enough that none of this is to be taken seriously anyway. Everyone’s here: a laconic Russian bear with a Duke Nukem haircut (and a gun to match), the uptight mercenary who establishes himself as a prick from the get-go (a slumming Adrien Brody, looking rather bored with the proceedings and wishing he was wearing an ascot instead), the feisty woman who kicks ass (the Brazilian actress Alice Braga plays an Israeli here), the jumpy psycho in the orange jumpsuit (the always-good Walton Goggins, destined forever to play the jumpy psycho, though not always in a jumpsuit), yet another laconic soldier from the Sudan, and so on. They’re picked off slowly but predictably by the Predators, but not quite in the order I expected.
[Wee SPOILER alert] Predators actually has a decent acting ensemble despite the fact that Danny Trejo doesn’t make it to the final two – sorry, I still can’t let it go – but for real inspired casting, one need not look further than the welcome appearance of Laurence Fishburne about halfway through the film playing – get this – a bloated Colonel Kurtz-type with, er, one follower. Add to this an ending that features Brody all slathered in mud like Martin Sheen Arnold Schwarzenegger, and you can see why I think it’s inspired.**
Predators would have been a worthy sequel if it weren’t for the fact that the action sequences simply aren’t very well-executed, and I almost want to watch McTiernan’s film again just to see how they were done in the first place. It’s a shame, because Antal’s a quite effective thriller director – see his earlier film Vacancy, from 2007, where he nicely exploits a cramped, claustrophobic set. (No, seriously: Vacancy derives its genuinely frightening intensity almost wholly from skillful editing and the constant awareness of where almost everyone is and where the doors are.)
But the technical limitations, I suppose, are obvious, and stem from the narrative itself: trees everywhere, invisible enemies, a Predator-cam that reduces its prey to shifting orangey globs – I mean, how do you film that sort of thing? There are some interesting sets, like appropriately Giger-esque ships, but the Predator encampment, with sharp stakes and ratty-looking canvas, looks like a sorry outtake from Cannibal Holocaust. In the many fight sequences, it’s hard to figure out what’s going on without a good sense of space or scale; both predator and prey seem to zip around the jungle endlessly.
Perhaps my main complaint about Predators is that – well, it’s just not Predator. Still thrilling in all its lunkheadedness many years later, Predator had the virtue of simplicity: an actual cohesive acting ensemble (they were working as a team, after all), the relative lack of backstory (arguably essential to the horror genre), the slow realization of what was out there in the jungle, and huge amounts of testosterone to go around. The climactic, spark-filled showdown between Arnold Schwarzenegger (himself already an over-the-top presence) and the alien, for instance, had a lurid, operatic quality to it, as if their very manhoods were at stake. In Predators we get – well, Adrien Brody, whose character cares little about everyone else, and so does the audience. Sigh. If only he were Danny Trejo.
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*The idea that there were two (two!) U.S. State governors in this 1987 film blows my mind. But I was taken to task by my friend D for not getting the references to the rest of the Predator mythos – my fault entirely, since I hadn’t seen the three (three!) intervening films. She promptly schooled me on the finer aspects of Aliens and pyramids and hybrids and helmets and elongated heads, but I couldn’t take it all in; I was too busy hanging my head in shame, bested by someone apparently geekier than me.
**No, seriously! Neither Fishburne’s character nor Marlon Brando’s character meet in Apocalypse Now, but decades later Fishburne plays a madman in the jungle in a movie where the audience has to wade through two-thirds of it until he appears! Is that awesome or what?
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