REVIEW : PREDATORS

PREDATORS

Like many others, I eagerly awaited the true sequel all fans of the original 1987 testosterone-fuelled classic Predator have been dreaming of… Oh well…

I let myself get excited over this film from the first moment I heard it was in production. For years I’ve wanted nothing more than to see the series return to its jungle roots (AVP2’s woodland rubbish doesn’t count, because that film, like its predecessor, simply doesn’t exist), and Predator 2’s concrete jungle, while great in its own way, just didn’t have the same impact on me as the organic setting of the first film.

Predators opens with a variety pack of bad-ass killers parachuting unconsciously deep into a strange jungle. Off to a good start. There’s Royce (Adrian Brody), a gravel-voiced mercenary who adopts the role of reluctant leader, hired muscle Cuchillo (Danny Trejo), minigun-wielding soldier Nikolai (Oleg Taktarov), sniper Isabelle (Alice Braga), guerilla fighter Mombasa (Mahershalalhashbaz Ali), psychopathic murderer Stans (Walton Goggins), sharp-suited Yakuza, Hanzo (Louis Ozawa Changchien), and seemingly weedy doctor Edwin (Topher Grace). When they come to and bump into each other, after they’ve waved their willies around for a bit they decide to group together to find out where they are… When they do (I’ll not ruin what little impact it has by divulging where they are), let me just say that they’re not best pleased with the situation! To add insult to injury, it soon becomes clear they are being picked off by everyone’s favourite scorpion-faced extra-terrestrial hunters (with some new toys), as well as their big brothers, and even their pet pooches get in on the fun. Along the way they encounter Noland (Laurence Fishburne), a survivor from a previous hunt, who offers the group shelter in his hideaway, but at what cost…?

Hearing that the film was going to be developed from a Robert Rodriguez (Desperado, Planet Terror, Machete) script that he wrote in the mid nineties, and that he was producing it himself made any concerns I had about the relatively inexperienced director Nimrod Antal (Vacancy, Armoured) being at the reins of such a beast melt away, and as the plot, actors and concepts were teased to us over time, my expectations just kept rising… What eventually surfaced was a painfully average action film, with mostly forgettable characters (aside from Fishburne’s Noland, and, to a lesser extent, Brody’s Royce), and a distinct lack of tension throughout. Between some hammy performances (looking at you here Grace), and too-obvious hints within the direction, the few plot twists that do exist within the story are so telegraphed that even your average Hollyoak’s viewer would have worked them out long before their eventual reveal, meaning that this blockbuster roller-coaster mostly ends up feeling more like a train ride at a petting zoo.

Don’t get me wrong, Predators is not a bad film, but it was more mediocre than it could afford to be. Lesson learnt.

JonnyRAW