I think Predator has always been in the shadow of the Alien Franchise, especially with the Versus movies where you know that Alien is always the better of the two in terms of actual films. You can’t argue with the greatness of the first two Alien movies–even if the last two are just so-so–but Predator was good, very good even, but that’s it. Predator 2 certainly wasn’t up to much with Danny Glover being a poor replacement for Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Versus movies, although not as terrible as the critics would have you believe, certainly weren’t up to the Sigourney Weaver quality. Now we have the self-professed sequel to Predator which conveniently ignores the actual sequel, Predator 2. This is back to the jungle, albeit lack Arnie.
A group of trained killers from all around Earth are parachuted into a jungle with no knowledge of what happened for them to get there and it doesn’t take long before they realize that they are on an alien planet being hunted for sport by the titular Predators. None of these characters are particularly bad but there isn’t exactly in-depth characterization going on. Every single one of them is a cliche: huge Russian with a mini-gun, token black guy who I was surprised to find wasn’t the first to die (he’s the second), a uzi-toting Mexican played by Danny Trejo, a man who must be in the front of the cue for all Mexican parts, a death-row inmate complete with orange jumpsuit, a Yakuza, a sniper-rifle toting female and Adrien Brody’s generic tough guy main character. The one interesting character is Topher Grace, an actor who seems to be making his name playing strange and twisted bad guys as he did in Spiderman 3, who is the odd one out of the bunch; he’s a doctor, not a soldier or any other kind of toughened hard-ass like all the rest of them. Of course, he’s not really just a doctor but you find that out eventually.
Predators acts as something of a tribute to the original and it works rather well. Adrien Brody is Arnie in all but name, even if he does still look a bit weedy despite obvious serious gym time and perfecting the sore-throat voice that all these kinds of characters seem to have, and some of the characters are shadows of what came before. There is no one that can match Arnie’s natural butchness or Jesse Ventura’s “god-damn sexual tyrannosaurus rex”. Neither is the script as fun as the original with far too many cliched lines coming from the cliched characters.
The predators themselves are fleshed out a bit from all the other movies, with talk of a blood feud between the predators that we know of and a larger, more viscous breed that has a completely brilliant design. There’s also other alien creatures on the planet and some details of alien plants that helps give it some sci-fi cred.
It’s fun and kind of throwaway, much like the first one, and even if it does repeat a lot of what the original did it still can stand on its on as the second best Predator movie.
