Stalk Exchange
Once again, a movie has fallen victim to its trailer. Typically, previews give the audience more information than they need—going beyond who’s in the movie and an idea of what the story’s about, and straying into plot-point territory. Nearly every romantic comedy, epic fantasy, and mainstream weepy of the last five years (at least) has been undone by the fact that the audience knows exactly what they’re getting into from the moment the theatre lights dim.
Predators is special, though. Its trailer showed a good deal of restraint and was a genuine, brain-tickling tease. We see a group of mercenary-types dropped into a jungle; they don’t know each other, and have no idea where they are or why they’ve been assembled. “They’re the best killers on the planet,” we’re told.
“But this…”
“…Is not our planet”.
The screen then explodes with quick cuts of the Predator creatures hunting and fighting their human prey. The trailer culminates in a sci-fi/horror geek money-shot of Adrien Brody standing tall as the famous three-point laser sight circles his chest; then another; and another; until he’s lit up by twenty of them. It’s a wonderful, suspenseful image that—combined with the Alien-like score—convinced me to see the movie. Granted, I would have seen Predators anyway; but this made me excited for it.
If you had the same feeling watching this preview, I warn you now that we’ve been had. Despite Executive Producer Robert Rodriguez’s claims that this was a passion project of his—born of an allegedly bad-ass script he wrote twenty years ago—there’s absolutely nothing in this movie that screams, “A sequel two decades in the making!” If anything, this is a muddled, off-the-shelf rehash of Predator that cynically uses hope and hype to drum up fan interest.
The film’s premise raises two big questions: Who will survive? How will they get off the planet?
Going by the formula of the first film—with Brody acting as the Arnold Schwarzenegger stand-in and Alice Braga playing the part of Survivor Girl—it’s probably better to rephrase the first question as, “Which non-obvious characters will survive?”
For the first half of the movie, I was convinced that other members of the de facto team would make it, and not merely serve as gore props. Each of the cast has a unique look and is fun to watch—particularly Oleg Taktarov and Walton Goggins as a Russian soldier and a death-row inmate, respectively. Like the special ops crew in the first Predator, they’re all hardened and colorful, but they freak out a bit when they realize they’re not the baddest boys on the block. Sadly, at the mid-point of Predators, once we’ve gotten to know the main cast and have seen them work together to fend off traps and a stampede of vicious horned dogs, the Predators show up and turn the rest of the film into a muddled, boring body-count movie that’s no better than the worst installment of the Saw franchise (Part 5, if you’re keeping score).
Yes, Rodriguez knows that his audience is thirteen-year-old boys and has no qualms scuttling character development and intrigue in favor of laser fights and impromptu spine removals. What’s fascinating to me is how quickly the story went downhill. When Laurence Fishburne shows up as a survivor from a previous “game drop”, it’s as if the rest of the cast took a cue from him and stopped trying to act. He goes into full Brando-in-Apocalypse-Now mode: mumbling to himself, shuffling his considerable, bald mass from here to there, and eventually trying to kill everyone.
Fishburne was my first indication that the creative force behind this movie really had no idea what it wanted to accomplish, and I began to notice other flaws—like the muddled set design (it was hard to discern what I was supposed to be looking at for half the movie); the fact that the film’s budget apparently dried out somewhere around week three, resulting in the re-use of the same location about six times in the last forty-five minutes; and the evaporation of any real characters, forcing me to not care who lived or died.
Which leads me to Question Two. The one great running mystery of Predators is how the hell anyone will get off the planet (and, when they do, how they’ll get back to Earth, which looks to be several galaxies away). There’s a great turn where Brody’s character’s attempt to commandeer a Predator ship is foiled by a bomb. Watching the movie, I kept thinking, “Wow, they’re really painting themselves into a corner here.”
Amazingly enough, the movie’s answer is that there is no answer. The movie ends with the Predators defeated and a new shipment of game being dropped into the jungle. Brody and Braga stand in a clearing, watching the sky. Brody says, “Now, let’s figure out how to get off this fucking planet”. They turn and disappear into the foliage.
Seriously, that’s how they end the movie.
I was gobsmacked. On one hand, I was glad the movie was over; on the other, I felt utterly cheated out of a resolution I’d suffered two hours to reach. It’s like getting to the end of Jaws and seeing Roy Scheider holster his flare gun (“Man, someone should do something about that shark!”). The end of Predators doesn’t even feel like the gateway for a sequel; it’s more of a shrug, a realization that this was the best that the brain trust at 20th Century Fox kinda maybe sorta could do.
This movie has nothing on the original. Predator rose above the Schwarzenegger-cheese factor by giving us a war movie that suddenly became a sci-fi adventure. It was full of surprises, mostly relating to a creature whose design, actions and purpose were utterly new—and challenging to the protagonists. There’s none of that imagination here; none of that sense of discovery or danger.
The only surprises are that A) Adrien Brody can play a convincing, ripped tough guy and B) that money-shot from the trailer—with the multiple sights on Brody’s body—is a lie. In the movie, there’s one sight. The trailer would have you believe that the human mercenaries must square off against a whole army of Predators. In reality, there are only four in the whole film.
It’s fitting that Predators was directed by a guy named Nimrod Antal. I’m sure he’s a nice guy or whatever, but he and Rodriguez made this movie for idiots.