PREDATORS Movie Review

Hey, it’s a franchise reboot! For the summer! It’s a franchise reboot for the summer of a classic 80’s action movie, with a trailer that lies to us, I wasn’t expecting that! Though I should have, because originality in cinema nowadays is limited. It’s as though the new guy at the fortune cookie factory forgot to press the button that says “change fortune”, and every single wrapper we open tells us that we are a deep and thoughtful person. The more thoughtful I become of Predators, the deeper my anger digs, and I’m confident that by the end of this review, I will froth at the mouth like a rabid bear and scream obscenities at my monitor, glowing in blissful ignorance and unaware that I could shatter it in a moment of nerd rage.

Predators starts off well enough, with Adrian Brody waking up to find himself plummeting through the sky and his parachute not deploying. After a landing that appears to shatter his arm, he gets up and meets Danny Trejo, who, as always, plays a Mexican cartel enforcer because apparently, that’s all Mexicans ever do. They find more and more people, including Giant Fucking Russian with a Giant Fucking Gun, Hot Jewess, Spiritual Black Man, Quiet Asian Man, Rapist/Serial Killer White Trash Convict, and Weak Dork, played by none other than Eric “Dumbass” Foreman, aka Topher Grace. It’s a great intro, not just because it’s intense – wake up and you’re falling, that’ll send your balls back inside your body – but also because everyone is confused as to where they are, why they’re there, and why they can’t remember anything. They are lost in the most profound sense of the word, fearful of what is to come.

After a little bit of exposition, the game truly begins, as the group is slowly hunted by three Predators and come to the realization that they are on a wildlife preserve. They find a survivor, they find the remains of the losers, and there’s a happy-ish ending to cap it off. Guns blaze, limbs are severed, and Adrian Brody covers himself in mud and starts a bonfire.

Wait, what?

Yes, there are some callbacks to the original movie. When the group first comes face to face with a predator, Brody gargles out Arnold’s classic “What the fuck are you?” The music is taken right from the first movie, and Alice Braga’s character Isabelle retells the story of first contact in that fateful jungle. There’s a section of the forest that has traps, including a massive swinging log, and GFRwaGFG Nikolai (Oleg Taktarov) cuts down some tree with his minigun. The predator camp even has the skinned remains of whatever beasts they killed before the humans got there. It’s a great way to remind us of how good the first movie was.

Despite the gun play and a few very messy and entertaining deaths, the movie’s faults are numerous. Allow me to nitpick:

- The group is in a jungle, but after walking for a little bit, they are in a temperate forest interrupted by what appears to be a stone-and-puddle plain. Then they are back in a jungle, but it’s sometimes a temperate forest.

- Like most 80’s action movies, guns have seemingly infinite ammunition, at least until a firefight ends, which is great if the characters could hit anything. These are professional killers who cannot hit a lion-sized alien dog.

- Nikolai has a minigun that can cut down trees, but he can’t hit a pack of the aforementioned aliens barreling towards him.

- Laurence Fishburn has a throwaway role. He is on-screen for about ten minutes before he vanishes in a mist of blood, despite being the most interesting character in the film.

- How did the predators not find him in an abandoned spacecraft that generates power, the only such contraption in a fucking park?

- The multiple predators hinted at in the trailer don’t exist. There are three, and there are only two scenes where more than one of them is on screen at a time. The implied multiples in the title are a shameful cock tease.

- Louis Changchien’s Hanzo character is literally a Japanese ahhhh most honourabre stereotype. He says nothing for most of the film, then finds a katana and nobly sacrifices himself. He literally turns around as the group is running from a predator, whips out the sword, and has a duel under a fucking cherry blossom tree in a field of tall grass. Why not throw in a goddamn weeping wife in there somewhere, and a child ready to avenge his father’s death?

- Brody’s Royce is a loner, ready to leave his companions behind if it means his survival, but – Surprise! – he comes back at the end after running away to do the right thing. I like hot Jewish sniper girls too, but either stay with her through the whole mess or leave her the fuck behind. Don’t suddenly change for no reason at the end. He grew a conscience in the 30 seconds it takes him to run to a spaceship? Please.

- Continuing with Royce: during the explanation of the original movie, Isabelle says that the predator’s heat signature tracking can be muddled by covering oneself with mud. Royce does just that at the end, but then starts a giant fire around a camp. Why cover yourself in apparently cold mud, then light a portion of the jungle on fire? Why bother with the mud in the first place? It’ll bake and flake off as you run around the fire like a goddamn hippy who got too drunk at Burning Man.

- None of the characters figure out that Topher Grace’s Edwin is a murderer. Let’s look at the facts: everyone has weapons except him, everyone is either in the military or has killed dozens, if not hundreds, of people, and all of them know how to fight. Hmmm, this guy must be the odd man out, probably because he’s a doctor and knows which plants paralyze you despite never having set foot on this alien fucking planet. How the fuck do you not put two and two together and realize that this seemingly limp-wristed poof is a cold and calculated serial killer who does not need an automatic shotgun to kill you? How does a character like Stans, a death-row inmate who jokes about rape and cocaine (played very well by Walton Goggins of The Shield) not notice that he has probably had lunch with about 50 people just like Edwin?

- Half the pack of alien dogs is recalled by the predators, but does not reappear in the movie, even as their masters are being killed. Shit, Fido, did someone not put enough chow in your bowl?

- Why is no one skinned?

I enjoyed this movie at first, but every day after seeing it I get angrier and angrier that it was made. Did no one bother to look at any of those issues and say “Hey, this doesn’t make sense…” No, because they were obviously too busy fellating the memory of the original movie and shoving rolled up hundreds dollar bills in their rectums in anticipation of the fanboy millions this would bring in. I wanted people being hunted one by one in a jungle, and I got that, but it was covered in plot holes and clichés and I am so angry that I’m probably not going to enjoy my dinner tonight. Nerd rage!