Predators

Predators

By Jonathan Fisher, July 13th, 2010

Predators hits the ground running, which is just what you want from an action movie. The opening scene is an intriguing one -- a mercenary named Royce (Adrien Brody) gains consciousness several thousand feet above the surface of a mysterious, dangerous jungle. When he lands, he discovers that several other people have found themselves in the same predicament. Their occupations share common, violent ideals -- a Japanese Yakuza member, a death squad member from Sierra Leone, a Serbian soldier, a South American mercenary and a female American special operative. Eventually they come across a doctor (played by Topher Grace), breaking the pattern, but then without Grace, who would provide the movie's comic relief?

The group discover that they all have no recollection of how they came to arrive at this strange place, but they (correctly) suspect it's not for an innocuous reason. An early attack from a pack of weird hog-creatures confirms their suspicions, as does the discovery that this new planet has a sun that does not move, as well as several enormous moons that are visible in daylight. Royce cleverly deduces that they are being hunted by something.

What follows from this set-up is a passably entertaining cat-and-mouse story that might not live up to the original brilliance of the 1987 Predator, but at least cleanses the palate of the dreadful Alien vs Predator franchise. For the uninitiated, Predators are highly evolved aliens (aliens that apparently evolved independently into bi-pedal vertebrates, just like us) that can do all sorts of scary things -- laser vision, invisibility, spine-ripping strength.


Predators director Nimrod Antal does the wise thing of keeping the Predators in the shadows for most of his movie. As soon as we get a chance to get a really good look at the Predators, though, they lose their menace and intrigue. The Predators are brilliant villains for the first half of the film, as the characters try to work out exactly what is hunting them. After a couple of Predator-laden scenes, we remember that we're just watching another monster movie.

That really is all that Predators is -- a monster movie. Most of it is passably entertaining, and well-acted by Adrien Brody and his co-stars (including an amusing little cameo by Laurence Fishburne). The final third unfortunately blows a good start, as the film decides to overload us with hand-to-hand combat scenes between the humans and the Predators. The film may have been better served to continue taking a leaf out of Steven Spielberg's playbook. The best villains in movie history hardly get any screen-time at all. Hannibal Lecter was in Silence of the Lambs for seventeen minutes. The shark in Jaws is never seen. Tell is better than show. For the first hour or so, Predators is all tell, and no show. The last act is all show and no tell, and that is just the movie's problem.

Predators Trailer: