On the couch

The burden of expectation is a terrible thing for a film to bear. Especially when it’s the weight of the hopes of eager fanboys who have waited over 23 years for a decent sequel, having suffered the ignominy of Predator 2 and the dubious pleasures of the two Alien vs Predators.

So, does Nimrod Antal’s flick live up to the hype and fulfill all the fanboys’ feverish hopes and dreams? Well, yes and no.
While Predators is far more faithful to the Gübernator-starring original than any of the efforts that followed and a grand B-movie romp to kill an evening, there is still something lacking. A hole that only watching it in the eighties could fill.
Silly tough guy flicks like Predator were great craic to watch back then because action heros only really came in two types – gigantic steroidal freaks whose wardrobe contained not one item of clothing that had sleaves but a whole pile of headbands and whip thin martial arts guys like Jackie Chan or Patrick Swayze.
In a post-Bourne Identity world, it’s kind of hard to buy the gruff, grunting Clint Eastwood-channelling soldier hero, even if the cast do look more like a bunch of actual soldiers rather than the chorus-line for The Chippendales.
The film starts with a bump. Or a near one at least. Adrian Brody’s character, a grumpy soldier-of-fortune type, wakes up to find himself hurtling towards the ground with a parachute strapped to his back.
He survives his plummet, the film would be a lot shorter if he didn’t and finds that he and seven other strangers, all military types, have suffered the same fate. They’re confused, they’re alone and they’re in a jungle that sure ain’t on Earth.
Almost immediately, the hunting/killing/alien terror malarky starts and it quickly becomes clear that while the gang are pretty handy when it comes to shooting and soldiering, they are being hunted by something infinitely more skilled, dangerous and invisible.
After the inital getting to know you punch-up, it becomes clear that the group is a Dolly mixture of international ass-kickers. There’s the Latina sniper (Alice Brage), the Russian tough guy (Oleg Taktarov), the Columbian drugs enforcer (Danny Trejo), the death row killer (Walter Goggins), the African mercenary (Mahershalalhashbaz Ali), the Yakuza (Louis Ozawa Changchien) and…the nerdy doctor guy (Topher).
Predators’ shift from Earth to wherever the film is set is a good decision by the filmmakers because it allows an amount of creative licence to be taken in the peril the prey can be put in.
Curious beasties and deadly flora are amongst the problems they face, as well as an interesting introduction of faction fighting between the predators and the different functions they serve within their hunting groups.
As the gang is slowly picked off – here’s a fun game: stop the film after five minutes and jot down what order you think they’re going to die in – you won’t be surprised. Laurence Fishburn rears his head as the surviving member of the last human delegation to be guests on the intergalactic game reserve.
Larry hams it up as a cross between Tyrone Miller, his character from Apocalypse Now and a drug addled Morpheus and fills in the gaps in the storyline and the group’s knowledge.
But while Fishburn seems to be having the time of his life, twitching and talking to himself, everyone else is taking the whole film way too seriously. Despite the cast all being more than competant actors, particularly Brody and Grace, they never seem to be anything other than the stereotypes they’re meant to represent. It’s all just a little boring.
There is some light in the film though, with the action scenes exciting and well shot and not relying too much on visual effects. The predators themselves seem to suffer from the law of diminishing marginal returns. The more there are in a movie, the less scary or interesting they are.
Try as Nimrod might, the world was never going to go for another Predator movie. Not fully. No matter how hard he tried or how faithful he stayed to the template, the success of the original was as much to do with the era it was released in as the film itself.
Expectations; they’ll kill you in the end…