In a nutshell, it’s a cross between Predator and Aliens – and let’s face it, irrespective of how well or badly a film is made, if this is the principle it adopts it has the building blocks in place to be one ruddy masterpiece of a cinematic event (at least for the All Action No Plot generation).
The film does not waste any time with such boring and slow-paced elements as preamble and scene-setting, opening instead with the protagonists literally dropping into the jungle and loading their weapons for a fight. I honestly don’t think they even bothered with names, or established who they ought to shoot – they simply aimed their weapons and waited for a chance to mow down various parts of the Amazon with their uzis and what-not.
(By this stage my readership ought to be swiftly separating into those who realise they are on the wrong page of the interweb, and those true All-Action-No-Plot devotees who have presumably already seen the film.)
That line about it being a cross between Predator and Aliens is no exaggeration by the way. The plot really can be defined thus. A bunch of pretty hardened commandoes in the jungle (admittedly minus the bulging biceps of Schwarzenegger’s merry men), hunted by an unseen beast? So far, so Predator. Throw in the fact that they are actually on the beasts’ home turf, and that there is more than one of said beast, and you have a healthy dose of Aliens. The characters are also lifted straight out of Aliens, without so much a as a cursory rub-down. Alice Braga plays a Ripley-Vazquez hybrid; Adrien Brody the quiet, wiry Hicks-style group leader; Walton Goggins the Hudson-style comic relief; while as a silent-but-deadly type who removes his shirt and decides to take on a predator with just one enormous sword, Louis Ozawa Changchien is a reincarnation of Predator’s Billy.
None of which should be thought of as pejorative, for just as these were winning elements to Predator and Aliens, so they provide fistfuls of goodness to Predators.
MANP does not mind admitting that it was with a strong degree of suspicion that it braced itself for Adrien Brody’s attempt to play tough-guy. Merrily enough, we grant him a Gladiator-style thumbs up. Just about. He does rather overdo it initially, doing everything short of carrying a sign saying “I’m bad-ass (and intense). Honest!” No time to stop and breathe, Brody does not use four words if three and a moody stare will suffice. He moodily declares himself leader, before examining the grass and moodily declaring they head yonder, then examining the sky and moodily declaring they hunt their captors or whatever. But it’s not a bad effort at all.
The pace is fast, and the suspense, hunter-hunted dynamic, violence and explosions are up there alongside the original. Predators may have benefited from more quotable lines, but this is pretty harsh criticism. It is a worthy sequel to the original, 1987 Predator. Whereas, say Terminator Salvation, seemed simply to be a summer blockbuster which almost sacrilegiously adopted the good name of the Terminator franchise to attract rear-ends to seats, Predators has the feel of a film lovingly hand-crafted by an aficionado of that original Schwarzenegger movie, an effort basically to replicate the original and give another 90 minutes’ worth to those who enjoy working “Get to da choppaaaa” into their everyday parlance.
