Predators

The first Predator movie was good mostly because of Ahnold’s incapability to be taken completely seriously, which led to funny bits within a lot of macho gun-slinging and blood-letting with neat sci-fi monsters and junk. A great combination. Ahnold is not in this one; still, it doesn’t really suffer for it.

Quite purposefully, Predators mirrors the second movie in the Alien series (Aliens), by attaching an ‘s’ to the end of the title. It also has more than one baddy oddly enough. Aliens had an ensemble cast, and so does this one. Aliens was a good movie, and so is this one. The problem with most of the other Predator sequels has been an overabundance of action and very little in the way of multi-dimensional characters; this time around, a whole ton of effort was put into finding good actors and giving them great developmental arcs (though varying in length, of course. This is still a slasher movie of sorts). There are short bursts of action throughout the movie, surrounded by quite nice character interaction, including a few side-busting quips from one or two of the guys.

Anyway, the movie’s about a bunch of hard-asses that get stranded in some place they don’t recognize in order to be hunted down by Predators for sport. They all have unique stories related only in the aspect of badassery. As you might expect, the movie involves cutting them down one-by-one until a satisfactory conclusion is reached, which I think was accomplished quite nicely.

Most of the strategic decisions are believable, though sometimes the explanations seem a bit coddling. Adrien Brody is usually the man with the plan, but doesn’t always tell everyone, which makes him cooler. I’m really quite happy with most of the roles he’s taken lately. I guess he figures one Oscar is enough. The rest of the cast varies in its colorfulness; Topher Grace seems a bit awkward sometimes, much like in Spidy III, but he doesn’t suck as much as that did. Some guy named Walton Goggins plays a convict-type and provides most of the comedy. Danny Trejo is his awesome self as usual, Laurence Fishburn doesn’t quite hit his stride but works well enough, and some Asian dude is pretty awesome in the stereotypical Asian action-hero fashion. The rest I don’t really care all that much about.

I suppose if you’re not a sci-fi fan, you probably won’t like this movie. Since I am definitely one of those dudes, I kept seeing things in here that just made me smile like a baby in a room full of bright colored objects. Robert Rodriguez now has a significant bit more of my respect.

Now let’s all try to forget Predator 2 and all those AVP abominations.