Climbing Higher Pictures

First thing’s first. Apologies for not updating the site for a little while. After the big update to the various extraneous pages, I’ve been focusing on publishing reviews in a timely manner to TheCinemaSource.com and haven’t had a chance to adequately syndicate them here. To make it up to you guys, I’m planning on putting up a ton of stuff in the next few days, so stay tuned for more updates as they become available.

As for the film below, well, if you really wanted to see it, you probably have already. That being said, for those who haven’t, the real question is “Should you?” and I hope to be able to answer that for you below.

Predators Review

By Ryan Hamelin

Movie Grade: B-

Damn. This has turned out to be an incredibly hard review to write. Why? Because the film succeeds with everything it sets out to do. I just don’t like it very much.

Lets roll that back a little bit. I walked into Predators with the kind of high hopes I hadn’t had for the franchise since it joined with Ridley Scott’s Alien for a series of mediocre cash grab installments. A standalone Predator sequel… based on a script Robert Rodriguez wrote fresh off of his El Mariachi debut… starring a bunch of talented, albeit it relatively unknown actors… and set in the jungle once more. How could that turn out badly?

The biggest reason this movie doesn’t work is due to its release date. Had it followed after the original, way back in 87, this would have been the sequel people were hoping for. Where Predator 2 is an exercise in tedium and rehash, this new incarnation evolves the setting and the characters sufficiently to stand alone. Adrien Brody and Lawrence Fishburne are particularly good casting choices, with each shouldering a large portion of the refuse the script rains down upon its major players. You want to see them succeed, you want to see them victorious, and each time they struggle you feel helpless to save them. However, this isn’t exactly reinventing the wheel.

The production seems to have titled itself “Predators” in an effort to draw comparisons to James Cameron’s Aliens. This would be fine, if they took any of the major notes from that masterwork to heart. Where Scott had made a dark and atmospheric sci-fi horror film, Cameron opened up the world for some incredibly satisfying action. Since we had already laid eyes on the creatures themselves, this genre shift satisfied an audience which was looking to progress to a different type of storytelling. Predators, on the other hand, does exactly the same thing its predecessor did. It’s a slow burn, a build up to an ending where the buff male hero has to go mano-a-mano against an alien race. That’s great for a first movie… but for a 5^th?

An even bigger issue is the villains themselves. Even the most sheltered child has come in contact with the movie iconography that is a Predator alien. Everyone knows they can cloak themselves, that they wear armor, that they’re incredibly large and strong, and that their mouths open in a weird mandible way. Because of this, you can’t spend a whole 40 minutes at the beginning of the film teasing the audience to their existence. We KNOW they’re there. We KNOW what they can do. You can’t do a suspenseful and mysterious buildup when the payoff is already understood by everyone. Even the fact that they’re on an alien planet is given away in every single trailer or tv spot. It just doesn’t work from a script standpoint, and it makes the experience varying degrees of frustrating and boring.

I wanted it to work. I love Brody. I love Rodriguez. I really think that there’s some juice left in the franchise. This just wasn’t the story that could sustain that momentum, and every time someone tells you that it’s a “leaner and meaner” version, just remember that it’s because they have a very shallow plot and little to no real production values. It’s a small-scale genre movie, just like the original, but that’s not what a modern audience has come to expect from a summer tentpole. You may enjoy it as a throwback piece of popcorn fluff, but I can’t shake the lingering feeling that it isn’t worth more than a matinee ticket.