My first problem with the film came in those first few seconds. The premise of the characters mystically falling out of the sky and landing in the same spot without any memory of how they got there was weak and lazy. It’s like screenwriters Alex Litvak and Michael Finch wanted to have an eclectic group of people from around the world fight the Predators, but they couldn’t be bothered to come up with a way to make it happen. When the characters are thrown together they adapt to the complete shock of the situation and start working as a team in a matter of minutes. Eight people who kill for a living get randomly plucked out of their violent lives, dropped thousands of feet through the air, fully armed, and then start acting like a team and playing follow the leader after only a couple of quick scraps? Not buying it. They almost instantly start acting more like characters who realize that they’re in a team-up movie than they do real people. Their story is rushed for the sake of keeping the film tightly paced, and any reality or legitimacy in character is thrown out the window. The character’s actions are always in service of the plot, no matter how senseless or bland they become due to that fact. Modern sequels are too focused on getting right into the action and being bigger, badder, and louder than the first film. It’s like no story is worthy of continuing just for the sake of future development and exploration; there has to be higher stakes. There’s not just one bad guy, there’s three bad guys. There’s not just one big fight, there’s three big fights. A lot of action sequels can get away with this easy shortcut to getting audiences interested in a second dose of a product because all of the character introduction has been done in the first film. They can get right to the action because we’re already oriented and invested. Predators doesn’t have that luxury, as it’s introducing us to all new characters. Nonetheless, it tries to go that route anyways, and it ends up falling on its face. The first Predator had a great Jaws-like build. First we were introduced to the human characters, we got to watch them face some human threats, and then we slowly started getting glimpses of the monster in the jungle. We’d get a look through its thermal vision here, a ripple of its cloaking field in the trees there. That first Predator methodically picked off the team from the first film one by one and it built up to it’s one on one confrontation with Schwarzenegger’s character beautifully. By the time they finally faced off you were drooling in anticipation. Predators uses no such strategy. It drops it’s characters in the jungle, hurries them into bonding as a team, hurries them into conflict with the Predators, and then they end up dying before we’ve ever been given a reason to care about them in the first place. And by the time the big final showdown takes place we’ve already been watching people fight Predators for an hour and a half anyways, so what’s the big deal about getting a little more? The art of delayed payoff, of building to an action sequence and actually making it mean something when it happens has been almost completely lost over the last ten to twenty years. If we had gotten a bit of the character’s individual lives before they got snatched off to the alien planet we would have cared about them a lot more. If the film had taken a lot more time focusing on the in-fighting of the group before they had to start taking on Predators it would have given the action a chance to build throughout the film, and could have given the screenwriters a better chance at sneaking in some further character development. Predators doesn’t feel like a film that had the time or money to pull anything like that off. Ultimately, it feels like it was a medium budgeted film that didn’t take much time to flush out its story, didn’t have the resources to shoot at more than one location, and isn’t nearly big or imaginative enough to relaunch the Predator franchise in a way that will be successful. I’m not even going to get into the glaring problem of one lone Predator being able to easily pick off a highly trained team of commandos in the first film, and three Predators hunting together not being able to instantly slaughter a disparate group of strangers dropped in a situation they weren’t ready for in this one. I don’t necessarily need believability in my action films, just some cool characters, and just a little foreplay to get me anticipating the explosions.
And that hope for a cool character to get behind brings me to my other big complaint about this film. Despite the fact that it also managed to do a lot of other things right, Predator was a film that built itself around Schwarzenegger’s star power. His charisma, his magnetic personality was the rock that everything else sat on. It was his name that got people in the door, his smirks and one liners that got them cheering in the theater, and his cool factor that had all the little kids in my neighborhood “playing Predator” on recess and after school. Adrien Brody is no substitute for Arnold Schwarzenegger. Brody is a fine actor, but Predators isn’t a film that needs a fine actor; it needs a movie star. Schwarzenegger’s Dutch was cocky and over the top tough. He didn’t just take out the bad guy, he had fun while he was doing it, and consequently it was fun watching him ply his trade. Brody’s Royce comes from the modern, Christian Bale school of growling and scowling. He’s deathly serious at every moment. He’s gruff, mean, and mysterious. We don’t know his name throughout the film. We don’t know his story. We don’t know his motivation. We are given no reason to cheer for him, no reason to care about him whatsoever. Actually, he’s kind of an uptight jerk. Now that I’m thinking about it, I wouldn’t mind seeing him get his head taken off by one of the Predators. For a guy who’s supposed to be the film’s protagonist, that’s a bad place to be. Modern action films have forgotten that they’re supposed to be fun; they’re too busy trying to show us how gritty and dark they can get. There is a brief spot in the film where this problem looked like it could have been solved. Laurence Fishburne makes a pretty great entrance into the mix about a third of the way into the proceedings. He plays Noland, a fellow bit of prey who has managed to survive on the planet for a couple of hunting seasons. He’s learned some of the secrets of the Predators. He’s cobbled together an arsenal of weapons. He’s developed a playbook full of strategies. Fishburne milks every bit of on screen authority his presence brings from playing sources of wisdom in films like The Matrix in order to get us to believe in the role. He’s swinging for the fences here, playing the character as a bit of a schizophrenic mixed with quirky, late career Brando. If he had taken the lead of the film from Brody’s character, if he had led the team in a mad dash assault against their hunters, if he had injected some of the insane fun that he brought to the role into the fighting, Predators could have got back on it’s feet. Instead, the role proves to be little more than a brief cameo. He shows up, he hams it up a bit, and then he goes away. His character feels more like a stunt than it does an integral part of the story. He’s nothing more than a brief distraction in a brief distraction of a film.
