Predators

dir: Nimrod Antal

2010

You may ask yourself whether the world needs more Predator movies. It’s a legitimate question. Reasonable and fair.

That’s like asking if trees needs more sunshine, or if a man needs more blowjobs.

The world didn’t necessarily become a better place upon the release of the first flick way back in 1987, but it certainly improved the lives of millions of teenage boys who now had something to tape off television onto VHS in order to watch endlessly. Well, something that wasn’t taped because of the prospect of boobs, BOOBS…

It was the truest, bluest action flick of its time, and it unashamedly traded on the steroidic charms of Arnold as well as a cast of lunkheads like Jesse ‘The Body’ Ventura and Carl Weathers, all of whom peaked with this flick where their only purpose is to kill time before they’re killed, so that Arnie could take care of business at the end, unencumbered by girly men or girly girls.

I’ve watched every inch of that flick so many times that watching it again is almost superfluous: If I was deranged enough, or poor enough, I could practically sit in a darkened room, close my eyes and play through the flick in my head, frame by frame, for its entire duration.

None of this is meant to assert that it’s actually a truly great and awesome film. Sure I’ve seen it more than I’ve seen Solaris, or 2001, or Weekend at Bernie’s, but it certainly is of its time. Arnie couldn’t have been more wooden or stilted in his delivery of dialogue if they’d constructed him from the remnants of sweaty and broken gym equipment, and danced him across the stage like a be-stringed marionette. Almost each and every piece of dialogue that drops out of his mouth more than two words in length sounds like speaking in any language, English or German for that matter, is unnatural and painful to him.

But no-one cares, because an invisible alien is killing his compatriots left right and centre, until Arnie strips down, muds up, and takes the ugly motherfucker out old-school.

So, yes, it’s pretty much a given that every element of the story that needed to be told was told right there and then in the first flick. Would subsequent flicks be superfluous, or, dare I say it, unnecessary? Pointless, even?

Of course. It was a self-contained story. Any other iteration would just be a copy, and any extension of it into more ‘complicated’ narrative or thematic areas would look stupid.

Stupidity has, of course, never been an impediment in movie-making, whether it be the perceived stupidity of the audience (by the studios), or the stupidity of those who think the world needs more Police Academy, Friday the 13th or Halloween movies.

In that spirit, Predators ignores everything that happened in Predator 2 (thankfully), and the Alien Versus Predator flicks, though in no sense does anything contradict anything else. Not that it matters. It’s essentially the same flick as the first one, except there are more people and more predators. Well, they’re all predators I guess, which is a verbal pun so lazy they even bring it up several times in the script, but there are three Predator aliens at least stalking our tender prey.

The story starts with an unconscious guy falling, falling, falling, and then waking up and struggling with the chute strapped to his body. He hits the ground eventually, and hooks up with some more people, who also seem to have arrived in a similarly strange manner.

Although almost none of them use their names until the end of the flick, our main guy is Royce (Adrian Brody), who is a ruthless mercenary type. He reminds me, the constant growl notwithstanding, of a sketch by the UK comedian Harry Enfield. In the sketch, Enfield would play a strange man who, no matter what the conversation or issue at hand, would revert to talking about all the horrors he’d seen as a soldier of fortune, from which he couldn’t retreat, which rendered all human discourse a pointless sham:

Woman: So, would you like fries with that?

Mercenary Character: Fries? FRIES! We would have murdered our mothers for some fries, that year, stalking rebels in the Congo, where we had nothing but leeches to eat for months. The blood, the gore we waded through burned out what was left of my soul until nothing was left, leaving me a monstrous shell of a man. No, you wouldn’t dare ask me about fries if you knew the things I’d done, the things I’d seen.

Woman: That’ll be three-pounds-fifty.

Mercenary Character: Keep the change.

Everything Royce says sounds not as if it’s from a screenplay, but like a sequence of grunted one-liners a crazy mercenary type has memorised and practiced in front of a mirror in order to deliver them in the appropriate situation in the most haunting of manners. He’s great, strangely great in a ludicrous role, because, let’s face it, it’s all pretty ludicrous, just like the first flick. It’s just perhaps not as much fun.

The rest of our killer victims break down along racial or demographic lines: a Mexican, silent Japanese, an Israeli special forces chick, a Russian, an African guy and a American death row prisoner. Oh, and some other shmuck who’s an American doctor. It’s a multicultural bunch.

The Mexican is a drug cartel enforcer, the Japanese guy is a Yakuza kendo expert, the African guy fights for a death squad, the Russian guy is Spetsnaz special forces, you get the idea. The thing is, whoever has kidnapped them and dumped them in this jungle is obviously a pop culture aficionado with a wicked sense of humour.

These heavy hitting killers wonder amongst themselves, then wander about the jungle until they realise that they have been brought here for a reason, and the reason doesn’t seem to be sociological or ethnographic in origin.

No, someone selected them because they’re the best at what they do, and They want to learn from the best, the way that high school biology students learn about the anatomy of frogs by dissecting them.

It’s no mystery that it’s Predators, an alien species of big, ugly Rastas with cloaking devices, shoulder-mounted cannons and big, sharp blades, who hunt for sport, honour, and for a laugh.

See, a bunch of good ol’ boy Predators get together every season, drink a shitload of booze, tell jokes and some tall stories, and then sublimate their homosexual desires for another year by shooting some animals dead.

It’s just that the animals, in this case, are people. And some animals, but mostly people.

Royce is the natural leader that the rest defer to, mostly. The rest are types, and exist really just to mouth dialogue, about either the threat that faces them, from which they have zero chance of survival, or about whether the last shreds of their humanity need to be retained, or whether they should be discarded like a bridesmaid’s panties in the name of survival.

It’s not entirely an inappropriate question. These creatures are inhuman, and love and live to kill, so they can’t be reasoned with or convinced otherwise to change from their path. Of course creatures like this are common in sci fi action, in that you couldn’t exactly sit down and have a conversation about ends versus means with the aliens from Aliens, or the terminators from the Terminator flicks or any character Julia Roberts has ever played.

But in this flick, just at those times when I thought they were going to go the grim route of individual survival at all costs (which Royce seems to be the exemplar of), they have a few moments of nobility, where a character (usually the Israeli sniper Isabelle) argues that saving each other is just as important as any one individual surviving. The Russian chap, despite looking like he’s the biggest murderer of them all, has some of the finer moments, though the resolution of his storyline is anything but quiet. Those Chechyans really did not know who they were fucking with.

There is a strange cameo from Lawrence Fishburne as an army guy who’s been living in this situation for years, and has been driven mad by it, and his dialogue, and delivery, is some of the kookiest shit I’ve heard or seen in many a year. He did make me laugh, but his existence is pretty much a plot device, and they would have saved a bundle by leaving him out. I’m certain the only reason he’s there is for a call-back to one of his earliest roles, and I’m certain that he hums a few bars from Ride of the Valkyrie, I’m just sure of it.

Speaking of call-backs or shout-outs, there are a fair few linking back to the original movie, and even to a bunch of other flicks, which either shows that the shmendricks responsible for the script were either being cheeky (by referencing Jaws, Aliens and Apocalypse Now amongst others) or they were being cowardly. Either way, the script and the dialogue is often batshit crazy, which is all right in my book for something like this.

It’s reasonably well shot, but the budget restrictions really show in some bits. Despite spending $40 million on it, most of which was spent on cookie dough demanded by Lawrence Fishburne as payment, some effects bits are terrible. There’s an explosion at one point that looks like it was drawn by a child onto the film stock itself with red, orange and yellow highlighter textas. It defies cheapness and just approximates an ugly level of laziness, though I doubt the director had anything to do with it (did he, Robert Rodriguez, you resourceful but cheap producer / bastard).

The worst sin the film perpetrates effects-wise involves the crappy implementation of the Predator cloaking, and their high-coloured vision, which looks terrible, and bad compared to what it cost them $2 to do back in the day with basic effects. Screwing that up, I think, is one of the main reasons critics (at least those capable of liking such flicks) and audiences turned on the movie.

I found it, surprisingly, a pretty tense flick, though not wonderfully well made, but atmospheric enough in places. Some of the action sequences are a muddle, especially a night fight between two Predators that made no sense. And some of the characters, like Fishburne’s and the death row prisoner, are utterly superfluous. But I liked the fact that it felt like a horrible and dangerous place to be stranded in, almost like being caught in Scranton, Ohio, or Albury, New South Wales, you know?

A place you’d kill to get out of.

Why it worked for me depends most of all on tone. They try to have a gallows humour throughout, but they entirely avoid a kitschy or camp take on it, which is what I feared, and which would have sunk it completely in my eyes. Sure, most of the good parts mirror similar sequences in the first flick, but when they’re done well, they work.

The ending was as good an ending for this kind of flick as I could have imagined or expected, not that I really understand how it all happened. Plot holes in a flick that depends on aliens kidnapping people in such a costly, time-consuming and pointless way just to kill them are pointless to point out, because none of them make sense. So asking yourself why a certain character would be stupid enough to think the Predators might like him, or why a certain character wasn’t on a ship when it blew up, are wastes of your valuable time. But I will say there was something very cathartic about watching a newly muscled-up Adrien Brody attacking a super-Predator with an axe.

And his last line, delivered better than Arnie ever could, did make me laugh

7 ways in which I look forward to the inevitable sequel / mashup, which I believe will be called Pride and Prejudice and Predators out of 10

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“There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.” – pretentious much for quoting Hemingway in a Predator flick? - Predators.