Predators - Take

When I was a kid, I would play a game. Every time I watched a movie like Alien or Predator, (and in the wake of those two movies, there were a lot of movies like them) I would try to guess the order of the characters’ deaths. Maybe that sounds a little morbid for a ten-year-old, but I got pretty good at it after a while. I haven’t played that game in years, but Predators got me off the bench. Thank you, Robert Rodriguez and Nimrod Antal, for bringing out the troubled ten-year-old in me one more time.

As most people who care to know such things already know, Robert Rodriguez wrote a treatment for this movie like a kabillion years ago. The people who make decisions about stuff like this, in their infinite wisdom, threw it in a drawer and greenlit a series of movies that turned two of the most iconic movie monsters of the last generation into, um, well…jokes. And not the good kind. I mean, like Margaret Cho-level. Then some executive went digging through some dusty filing cabinets to see what 40-year-old King Features Syndicate cartoon they could copy-paste Kevin James into and went, “Holy crap!” Then he called his buddy, Ronnie Metzler, over in production.

GUY

Ronnie, it’s me!

RONNIE

Hey, man. What’s shaking?

GUY

What if I told you that we’re sitting on a 

treatment for a wildly popular genre property 

by a well-known and (usually) very talented 

filmmaker who has enormous pull and appeal 

with genre audiences?

RONNIE

I’d say throw that sucker back in a drawer and 

let’s throw a monkeyful of money at the crabfest 

(yes, crab) that will become known as AVP:R, 

because after seeing it, the audience won’t even 

be able to muster the will to speak whole words, 

let alone complete sentences!”

GUY

Did I mention the property is from the 80s?

RONNIE 

Try back after we run these franchises so far into the 

ground that they only come up to steal and eat Eloi!

And so the treatment sat untouched for another four years, until another young hotshot executive found it after a particularly uncomfortable bout of illicit lovemaking (filing cabinets got sharp edges) with Valerie, the girl from marketing. He didn’t even bother to put his pants back on, but stood there, his wrinkled, powder-blue dress shirt the only thing covering his Christian shame, and called Brent in Development.

BUD 

Brent! You’re not going to 

believewhat I just found!

BRENT

Buddy, she’s nailed every guy here. 

It’s like a game of Battleship with 

her. I wouldn’t get too excited.

BUD

No, no, no! Robert Rodriguez wrote a 

sequel to Predator that doesn’t suck like a 

Night at the Roxbury! Wait…Battleship?

And so it was that in quick order, it was decided the Rodriguez would serve as the godfather to the project and oversee a hand-picked group of filmmakers to revise and update his vision of a group of human killing machines who are abducted and airdropped onto an alien planet, where they’re hunted by Predators….for sport! And perhaps profit, but the films never really get into the commercial side of what I can only assume is the lucrative business of human disenspine-ening.

They don’t need to. This flick is what monster movies are supposed to be, and what they haven’t been since, oh, let’s say Pitch Black: this mofo is frickin’ fun.  I’m very much over the whole eighties nostalgia thing, but for this flick, I can make an exception. No disrespect to Danny Glover, but this is the sequel Predator should have always had.

Relative newcomer director Nimrod Antal demonstrated he could navigate tight, tense character relationships in the immensely solid, if underseen Armored, and he rises to the task here as well. This is the first monster movie I’ve seen in fifteen years where the filmmakers seem to have bothered to look up the meanings of “suspense” and “storytelling.” Not that the movie is high-falutin’ in the least. This sucker revels in its simple premise and B-movie roots. There’s plenty of action, blood, gore, and creatures (the Predator-world “dogs” are particularly thrilling to ten-year-old me), but Rodriguez and Antal are smart enough to know that that all means jack unless you give a shit about the characters. And to that end, they gave us actors (not that the original Predator needed them. Did just fine without, thanks). Adrien Brody is an unlikely leading man in any film (except The Pianist), but especially this one. The one sticking point for me is probably that he’s miscast. He does his full-on best, but he can’t not be him.

The end result of getting competent, invested people on both sides of the camera is that they know how to set up an immersive fantasy where you, as an audience member, aren’t yanked out of the story every five minutes by stupid filmmaking choices. In short, a good movie lets you forget that you’re watching a movie so you can just go along for the ride. This goes double for sci-fi, and triple for summer movies. They’re supposed to be the epitome of escapism.

And it so it goes with Predators. We follow Brody’s character, Royce, as he literally appears out of thin air and falls to the jungle floor, where he meets a motley crew of killers, assassins and murderers from all different backgrounds. It’s like a model U.N. of badasses. From there, I get to start playing my game as the entire cohort tries to figure out where they are, who they can trust, and how they can escape while trying to avoid being turned into macho nachos with biceps sauce. Yes, even the token lady is macho. Topher Grace, on the other hand, not so much. It’s a great mix of antiheroes, a bunch of gritty, gruesome solo artists who have to come together and form a supergroup to keep their spinesnskulls from ending up on a laquered wooden panel in some alien’s rec room. It’s the Dirty Dozen in a spacejungle. This flick is a pure, unabashed testosterone fantasy, and it is a blast (from shoulder-mounted laser cannon).

Four out of five future Governors!