Predators

Life has not been good for the Predators since their 1987 cinematic debut.

After stopping Arnold from getting to the chopper, they’ve had to put up with some fairly poor assignments – Battling Danny Glover and Gary Busey in Predator 2 was a significant step down and getting upstaged by Aliens wasn’t half as much fun as it should have been.

However, the luck of the Predator has changed.

Along has come Robert Rodriguez, and armed with a spec script written in 1994 he’s put the invisible big-game hunters firmly back in charge.

Predators very deliberately goes back to the basics of the 1987 original, dropping a group of heavily-armed hard nuts into the jungle and then picking them off one by one.

Lead by Adrien Brody’s gravely-voiced, wiry mercenary, a disparate group of scary people – and Topher Grace – are parachuted into the alien rainforest and then hunted for sport.

Entertainment is the number one priority here and in some respects the only thing that really sets this apart from Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem is the superior talent both in front of and behind the camera.

The story is fairly standard, but good, even though nothing particularly revelatory happens. Yet it’s the action and suspense that really pulls this beast along and both are light years ahead of not only the AVP films, but also most of the pale pretenders to the sci-fi horror throne.

Rodriguez, who only writes and produces (Hungarian up-and-comer Nimród Antal calls the directorial shots), has said he wanted the sequel to do for the Predators, what Aliens did for the Alien franchise. Sadly this hasn’t quite happened; the natural escalation just isn’t there.

Neither has it really matched Predator. Brody is a good enough actor to convince as an extremely hard mercenary – he’s certainly put on the muscle – but he lacks Arnold’s charismatic screen presence and struggles to carry the film.

And while the mismatched killers are fun – especially Walton Goggins’s death-row con, armed only with a prison shank, and Louis Ozawa Changchien’s silent Yakuza enforcer – sadly no one really shines.

Still, it’s good to see the Predators back on top.

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