News Hit

Release date: 8 July

Length: 107 minutes

Rating: MA 15+ (Strong Violence)

It is perhaps unfair to compare Predators to the original 1987 film of the same name minus the S, but that won’t stop me from doing so. It’s practically impossible not to.

Directed by a dude named Nimrod Antal (Vacancy) and produced by Robert Rodriguez, Predators stars Adrien Brody and a bunch of other familiar faces with guns that take on a bunch of familiar mandible-faced aliens with lasers in the dense jungle of a distant world.

There are so many similarities to the original film, in fact, that it is obvious from the outset that the franchise was heading back to its roots.

With the disappointing but still kind of cool sequel Predator 2 made a few years after the first, and the films of the Alien Vs. Predator franchise that most have mixed feelings about, the filmmakers have clearly reused some ideas from the original film in hope of lightning striking twice: a team of badasses stranded in a jungle, a lethal hunter hiding up in the trees, and the ultimate triumph of courage over brawn (O.K., I can hardly call Schwarzenegger the antithesis of brawn, but did you see the size of that Predator?!).

The makers of Predators thought they had the formula that made it work 23 years ago and that they could make it work again. They failed.

Predators opens midair, introducing Adrien Brody’s mercenary Royce as he’s falling through the sky on a collision course with the trees below. His parachute opens just in time and he lands in the dense jungle with no memory of how he got there. Brody quickly finds others in the same position and of a similar background: an assortment of soldiers and other miscellaneous killers.

Brody leads the pack and quickly discovers both that they are no longer on Earth and the reason why they have been taken: purely to be hunted for sport by the titular aliens. As a few are quickly picked off, the tough guys—and a tough girl—have internal troubles within the group, but stick together in the hope of evading their hunters and getting off the planet.

The original Predator is considered by many (not unjustly so) as a classic. Shane Black’s script leapt off the page because it had all the right ingredients: awesome action sequences, likeable characters and incredibly quotable dialogue. The last two points have just as much to do with the casting as anything else, for the actors (though you can just barely call any of them ‘actors’), knew how to be tough and deliver a line like a true tough-guy. And all of them were charismatic as hell!

Let’s just get one thing straight: Adrien Brody is a decent actor, but he’s no Arnold Schwarzenegger. Though the physique maketh not the man, Adrien Brody simply doesn’t seem tough in this film. The extent of his characterisation of a do-what-it-takes-to-survive action man seems to be a cold, gravelly voice. There is no warmth or charisma to be found in him. And the other characters aren’t much better.

Alice Braga is robotic as a tough soldier with a forgiving nature (as she continually lets Brody off the hook as he leads them into dangerous situation after dangerous situation for his own selfish reasons), Oleg Taktarov as a bland mini-gun-wielding Russian, Louis Ozawa Changchien as a Yakuza who barely has a word let alone a character in the film, as well as others who are equally forgettable and colourless.

Topher Grace provides mild comic relief, as does Walton Goggins from The Shield, who seems to be one of the few actors actually trying in this film, as well as the only one with any amount of likeability or charm, though some of his dialogue is a little sickening. Goggins' character also seems a touch more complex than the others. A prisoner on death row before being spirited away by the Predators; he always seems on edge, ready to snap, which I felt rang true for his character.

Also appearing for a brief period is Laurence Fishburne (both overweight and overacting) as a scavenger and survivor of a previous predator hunt.

The one major thing that they seemed to neglect in this film was true camaraderie between the characters, and the film suffers endlessly because of this.

The original film is about a group of friends as much as a group of soldiers. Sure, most of them died, which sucked, but we knew that Arnie would eventually exact revenge for his fallen comrades.

In Predators, no one knows each other, no one tries to get to know each other and they simply don’t have the time to get to know each other. So, when characters ultimately sacrifice themselves for the good of the group, it really doesn’t seem genuine, as none of them have a reason at all to want to help each other out to their own detriment. In Predator, when Billy (Sonny Landham) pulls out his machete and stays behind to fight, we know he won’t survive, but we have no doubt as to why he’s doing it: to buy his friends some time that could prove crucial to their survival.

When the Yakuza stays behind to fight a predator with a samurai sword (a nod to Kurosawa as much as the original scene from Predator), it doesn’t have the impact Billy’s scene does because he doesn’t have any reason at all to do so. He owes nothing to Brody and the rest of them.

The fight scene with the samurai sword is, well, kind of cool, but it hasn’t got the impact Billy’s scene does because relationships and connections are not strongly established, and we don’t even see the fight scene in the original. All we see is Billy’s writhing body after he’s had his ass handed to him. And it’s great!

There is a lot to be disappointed about in Predators, but rest assured, it’s not all bad. There are some interesting plot points in the film, and it ties up threads that I really hadn’t expected a film of it’s calibre to tie up. The action scenes, especially one in which these weird dog-hog things attack the group, are quite fast and thrilling.

The Predators are cool as usual, but are a little lacking. They seem clumsy, especially towards the end when two predators face off in a scene which looks more like a wrestling match and than a fight between intelligent hunters with hundreds if not thousands of years training engrained in them, and the climactic fight itself is quite brutal and barbarous.

Also annoying is the redesign of some of the predators, adding jawbones and tusks to their helmets as some sort of tribal symbol, which may give the idea that the filmmakers were trying to expand what we as the audience know about the predator’s culture, but it seems as though it was to make them slightly more menacing and easier to tell apart. There’s also nowhere near the amount of predators in the film than the trailer suggested, which I personally feel cheated by. Is it so much to ask that a trailer be mildly accurate? You’re right, it is.

One of the few interesting points the film tries to make is the brutality of human nature, and that we can be just as vicious as our enemies, but this statement seems a little ironic when our hero Adrien Brody is beating a mandible-faced monster to death with what appears to be a big animal bone. But maybe I missed something?

Pass

G Raymond Leavold