Predators

Beating a dead horse is Hollywood’s mantra these days.  In what is now the fifth installment in the Predator franchise, director Nimród Antal attempts to revive the series which went stale after two big-screen mashups, Alien vs. Predator and Alien vs. Predator: Requiem.  This film is likewise given the non-numerical title treatment, as if audiences might somehow forget it’s the fifth go-around.  Well, perhaps I’ve underestimated the average teenager’s obliviousness to the past.

A group of eight people awaken to find themselves lost in a jungle.  Among them, Royce (Adrien Brody) and Isabelle (Alice Braga)—both with military training.  There’s also a convicted felon, Stans (Walton Goggins), a Yakuza gangster (Louis Ozawa Changchien), and Nikolai (Oleg Taktarov)—a Spetsnaz operative.  Danny Trejo makes a brief cameo as a token Mexican cartel enforcer, and what body-count movie wouldn’t be complete without an assassin named Mombasa (Mahershalalhashbaz Ali)?  So, what the hell is Topher Grace doing in this movie?  I’ll get back to that shortly.

First-time screenwriters Michael Finch and Alex Litvak assembled a premise that’s less a story than it is a fanboy fantasy.  It’s unfortunate that there isn’t a story to actually bookend either the characters or their circumstances.  In the 1987 movie, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, a team of soldiers recruited by the CIA were sent in to the Guatemalan jungles on a supposed search and rescue operation.  Dutch (Schwarzenegger) discovers that there’s been a cover up, and the real mission is to destroy evidence of a failed covert operation.

Producer Robert Rodriguez went to a lot of trouble (read: wasted a lot of journalists’ time) to premiere just two minutes of footage at this year’s South By Southwest Film Festival.  This $40 million fan film lacks the (relatively) elaborate set-up of the original.  But both films quickly abandon a narrative in favor of a sci-fi slasher body count format that has since been imitated hundreds of times.

In the 2010 sequel, the team of mercenaries, military and, er… Topher Grace (apparently playing a doctor), soon discover that they’re not in Kansas any more, or any other place on Earth.  One observes, “We’re gonna need a new plan,” while another posits that they’re in hell.  They’ve been dumped on a planet used as a game preserve by the same, nameless alien race sporting dreadlocks in the iconic 1987 action film.  These creatures never actually had a name, but the director oddly commits that egregious error of introducing a conversation between Royce and the others solely for the purpose of mentioning the movie title.

They’ve been selected, Royce suspects, because they’re each predators of one sort or another—except Topher Grace.  Yes, I know his character has a name.  It just sounds funnier when you picture Topher Grace in a Predator movie.  But this actually works for the character, not against him.  At first glance, it would appear he was picked out of fairness.  It’s useful to have a doctor around to identify poisonous plants.  Wait… what?   Why did the aliens go to the trouble of transplanting numerous flora, but not fauna, however many light years from Earth to this hunting ground?  All the captives had to do was look up and see a few planets looming in the daytime sky to know they’ve been moved.

The rest of the characters are exactly as they sound.  For example, Hanzo is Japanese.  Therefore, it’s likely you will see him wielding a katana at some point, possibly in a field of tall grass.  Being Nigerian, Mombasa must obviously be the warlord of a death squad.  That’s the sole vocation of all Nigerians in Hollywood movies these days.

John Debney’s evocative score echoes traces of Alan Silvestri’s suspenseful, clanky piano theme for the original motion picture.  There are numerous other nods to the source: Creepy con Stan is found hanging upside down from his parachute caught on a tree.  The stocky, blunt-headed Nikolai wields a General Electric M-134 minigun, identical to the one Jesse Ventura used in Predator.  But (and this is a spoiler) I’m not buying Adrien Brody recalling Arnie’s most famous line.  Sadly, this being another solar system, there is no chopper for them to get to.

The caricaturesque former Mr. Olympia, Mr. Schwarzenegger, made it work because of his hulking size, goofy facial contortions and thick, Austrian accent—all of which tilt anything he says or does toward utter hilarity.  This was assisted greatly by the smooth delivery of comical one-liners by a whole cast of otherwise arrogant, musclebound jerks—a formula that Mr. McTiernan later applied as a general rule concerning any villain’s henchmen.

Mr. Brody and the others, in contrast to their cartoony predecessors, play a different type of movie, perhaps closer to James Cameron’s Aliens—complete with tough, Israeli sniper chick, as perhaps a nod to Vasquez; Mr. Cameron nods to himself in Avatar with the character of Trudy Chacon.  Here, they inhabit a slightly darker, more gruesome film.  The acting is competent and the action suspenseful.  Even though the remaining survivors are easily predicted, it’s somewhat interesting seeing how they get there.

Some ridiculous situations arise.  When the eight are drawn out into the open, the Nigerian’s expositionary dialogue repeats the clever aliens’ ruse we just saw in action.  Why?  Because Hollywood thinks you’re stupid.  In a darkly-lit scene in the catacombs of an abandoned base, Royce’s flashlight makes whooshing sounds as it cuts through the foggy air.  I wasn’t aware that light did this, but I did play with my iPhone LED for a while to no avail.  And why, may I ask, didn’t the group take a slain Predator’s helmet when they observed that it controls their cloaking ability?

There’s also a new species, a “super predator” (according to the credits), which hunts the regular-size aliens as well as the humans.  But here is where the tension weakens.  Portraying the classic and super predators, Derek Mears and Brian Steele are 6’5″ and 6’7″, respectively.  By contrast, the 1987 production had cast the staggeringly tall Kevin Peter Hall who, at 7’2″, towered over Arnold Schwarzenegger.  To be dwarfed by an even larger adversary served as a punchline to the sight gag of a group of hyper-masculine men.

In a sense, this film has been engineered to deliver what fans want, but ignores that the success of Predator, while owing much to the height of Mr. Schwarzenegger’s popularity, was also something of a fluke.  It was director John McTiernan’s second feature, after the low-grossing Nomads, and the first for writers Jim and John Thomas.  If IMDb is to be believed, the story concept began as a joke supposing that E.T. was the last person Rocky Balboa had left to fight.  But Mr. Rodriguez seems to be coming from the angle of those directors nostalgic for some film that influenced their vision and, lacking the respect to leave it alone, are determined to add their name to the franchise largely out of some notion of self-importance.

It works as entertainment on one (and only one) level, but fails as a complete and engaging story on many.  It goes through the motions, and has that familiar effect of instant gratification of many franchise resurrections. We revel in familiar territory, movie trivia, and the like, but after a week, a day, maybe an hour, it doesn’t have the staying power of watching Arnold Schwarzenegger telling a guy he just pinned with a knife to, “Stick around,” and any attempt to recapture the loosely played one-liners feels far too forced.  Maybe they needed dumber actors?  Seeing The Pianist’s Adrien Brody doing one-liners is like watching Patrick Stewart cover Public Enemy’s 911 Is A Joke. Actually, that would be more entertaining than this entire movie.

Predators • Dolby® Digital surround sound in select theatres • Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1 • Running Time: 106 minutes • MPAA Rating: R for strong creature violence and gore, and pervasive language. • Distributed by Summit Entertainment

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