Smart, assured Predators respects B-movie qualities

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This article was published 09/07/2010 (5578 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

PREDATORS is B-movie Nirvana, a dark, serious take on a minor science-fiction classic that respects the qualities that made it a cable-rerun favourite. It’s got plot, performances, production values, great casting and tautly choreographed action.

Fanboys will jump foursquare upon this movie.

Produced by Robert (Sin City) Rodriguez, who took a pass at reviving the franchise some years back, and directed by Nimrod Antal, the film assaults viewers (in a good way) from Frame 1. You know you’re off to a good start when the movie begins with an unconscious Adrien Brody plummeting through clouds while the alarm wired to his undeployed parachute blares its warning: impact imminent.

That desperate situation is nothing compared with what awaits him on the ground. Brody has landed in a dense jungle with odd trees and bizarre animal life. His companions: a Mexican gangbanger, a silent Yakuza, a Russian infantryman, a sociopath on the FBI’s Most Wanted List, a sultry South American sniper, plus assorted stone-cold killers. They all remember a bright light blinding them while they went about their daily death-dealing, then free-fall. Realization dawns. They’re in an alien hunting preserve and it’s open season on humans.

Our heroes are a colourful bunch. Brody, who usually portrays pensive, wounded-looking types, is reborn here as a hard-as-nails, no-mercy mercenary. Unbelievably, it works. Lowering his voice to a take-charge rumble and sporting a Ramboesque new physique, Brody is the thinking man’s Sgt. Rock. With a clever nod to the first Predator film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, CIA sharpshooter Alicia Braga provides background on the group’s reptilian adversaries, detailing their fearsome capabilities (infrared vision, laser weapons, invisibility cloaks and the rest). Topher Grace is the group’s Nervous Nellie, a panicky doctor with only a scalpel for a weapon. Louis Ozawa Changchien, the tight-lipped Japanese mobster, is as imposing in stillness as he is fluid in action; Antal gives him a samurai-sword sequence in waving grass that is positively elegant.

It’s a welcome respite in a propulsive film that puts audiences through a dozen white-knuckle rounds of the seat-squirm tango. The predators like to play with their prey, and Antal does the same with viewers. He wrings gorgeous tension out of the rainforest setting and caves where characters shelter.

The stakes rise as these alpha male killers (and the strong female) jockey for position, moral codes are tested and survival becomes the ultimate value. The script asks whether staying alive at all costs is worth the price. The film wisely keeps a couple of trump cards hidden, with character reversals and a cameo by an A-list actor that torques the tension still higher. It’s as if Marlon Brando’s Col. Kurtz from Apocalypse Now dropped by to contribute a crazed monologue, another weird grace note in a smart, assured film that raises sci-fi survivalism to the level of existential struggle.

— Minneapolis Star Tribune

 

Movie review

Predators

Starring Adrien Brody, Topher Grace, Alicia Braga

Grant Park, Kildonan Place, Polo Park, St.Vital, Towne

14A

3 stars out of 5