Predators was so far off my radar that I walked into this thing with only a few basic clues. I was going to let it go by and then I wake up Friday morning and
io9.com is talking about how surprisingly good the movie is and Yahoo! News is saying the same thing and suddenly I feel like a movie, damn it! Actually, I’ve been feeling like going to a movie all week, and since neither my stupid-but-fun movie (
Sorcerer’s Apprentice, and guys, I’m telling you right now I am too far gone on this one to feel the least bit embarrassed to admit I’m paying full admission price for this next weekend. I saw that it was coming out on Wednesday in the paper the other day and
I squealed and clapped my hands. Pray for me.) nor my intelligent-highly-anticipated-and-so-well-reviewed-already-that-my-expectations-are-currently-diverting-air-traffic movie (
Inception, which looks so balls to the wall awesome I can forgive Ellen Page’s presence) have come out yet, I decided, what the hell, I could use two hours of wandering around a jungle and getting beat on by aliens. Below are my HUGELY SPOILERIFIC thoughts on the whole matter.
- I did not buy Adrian Brody: Action Star once. I know a lot of people are saying he did a terrific job and that he surprised them with how well he took on an action hero role, but…I just couldn’t see it. I kept getting thrown out of the movie. “What the hell is Adrian Brody doing here?” “Who thought it was a good idea to give Adrian Brody a gun?” “Why do we need Adrian Brody and Topher Grace? Surely they’re playing the same type of character.” And yet, no, he was our Hero, he kept being our hero for close to two hours, and I just couldn’t make it work. He kept coming off as your little brother playing Alien Invasion in the backyard, complete with one liners he got from other movies and Gravelly Action Star Voice. Seriously, everybody else is talking fairly normal and Brody sounds like Bale’s Batman during flu season. I don’t know, maybe I just have to give it a while. I mean, supposing he makes a habit of this and I’m the only one who can’t see it as believable? That’s a sad world, right there.
- Boyd! Hi, Boyd! You’re my second favorite part of that show! And also…
- Movies like this can sometimes provide you with some of the most accidentally layered characters ever. I mean, yes, most of the characterization is based on what our guys are wearing when they fall out of the sky: guy in an orange jumpsuit, inmate; Japanese guy in a suit, yakuza; Danny Trejo, Mexican cartel, etc, etc. But you can’t have just a bunch of bad guys running around, being evil, and expect the audience to root for anyone besides the thing that’s killing them. You need positive personality points. So you get the funny one and the one with kids and the one who has honor, but, like, the funny one is also the one who’s in prison for violent rape, and the one with kids is carrying around a machine gun and the honorable one is only honorable because his organized crime outfit beat it into him. So you get these awesomely layered and sometimes incredibly ironic characters. And if you were watching a drama you know you’d be delving deep into their psyche and what makes them that way and you’d watch them have a character arc and grow into another person. But this is an action movie, so there will be no soul searching, the growth will consist of moving up from a blade to a gun, and the only arc will be the one their lifeless and field dressed body makes as it gets tossed aside like yesterday’s newspaper.
- Boyd (I seriously had the hardest time getting the names down in this movie. Most everyone had an accent and they were all being cagey about who they were in the first place and sometimes they were gurgling on their own juices. I keep calling him Boyd because that’s his character in Justified, but the actor’s name is Walter Goggins, his character’s name, according to IMDb, is Stans, and you might know him as Death Row Inmate) had my favorite lines and is a prime example of the Accidentally Layered Character, because he’s charmingly funny in this stupid way as he’s talking about…horrible things. I won’t even try to explain how funny I found the biggest chunks of dialogue he gets in this movie, because a) it really, really is horrible, and b) I don’t want to spoil it. I wasn’t the only one laughing in the theater, so I’m not the only one going to hell.
- The yakuza (who IMDb informs me was played by Louis Ozawa Changchien and named Hanzo) is easily my second favorite character because yea Gods. It’s like they were building this guy just for me. First, he’s walking around the jungle in an expensive and complete three piece suit and wearing it like a fox. Then he’s wearing a dark shirt and a vest and we all know how I feel about vests. Then he’s shirtless and muscular and covered in tattoos. All of which is happening on top of an Asian guy, and if you didn’t know, I’ll tell you right now: Shannon loves Asian guys. It’s the cheekbones and the eyes and the hair and the…everything. I’ll shut up now.
Like the fist of an angry God, I swear...
- Lawrence Fishburne shows up to provide an infodump which, while lacking in actual information, was full of twitchiness and imaginary friends. Also…
- Lawrence Fishburne is turning into James Earl Jones.
We're not quite at Separated at Birth status yet, but just let Lawrence get a little grayer and his head a little rounder...
- This movie also contains one of the best action movie deaths I have ever seen, wherein one of the predators knocks down Boyd and pulls his spine out of his back, up to and including the skull, and carries it like a goddamn foxtail. The only way it could have been better is if the predator had taken the skull and beaten Boyd to death with it (“That doesn’t seem physically possible!).
- We…weren’t supposed to be surprised when Topher Grace’s doctor character tried to kill the Latina chick, right? Because we’ve established that everyone else is considered a predator back on earth. We’ve got a multicultural, continent spanning group where the only thing everyone has in common is that they’ve killed someone (I was seriously waiting for secret hatches and a hot Scotsman to start popping up). We’ve established they’ve all been brought here because our alien predators want to become better at their job (predatoring?). Were we supposed to assume he was a mistake? That he was sitting next to an ex-con on the bus for some reason and they just misfired their Bright Light? Also, he’s got a scalpel on him. He wasn’t at work. He said he was going to work, and he’s already got a blade on him? Suspicious right there. And then when he stops the Spetsnaz guy from accidentally killing himself on the ugliest fucking flower in the entire universe, he gets a paralyzing neurotoxin all over said blade in a scene so obvious Chekov came back to life for a few seconds.
"If in Act I you have a scalpel covered in a paralytic neurotoxin, then it must stab an armed Latina babe in the last act."
- I totally didn’t get his whole ‘I want to stay here line.’ Granted, we don’t get a whole lot of detail on him beyond ‘I’ve murdered’ but you start to get the feeling perhaps the good doctor has been wearing a nice pair of crazy pants under his white coat for a while.
- It takes them the entire movie, but they finally get Brody shirtless. And it is just all kinds of awkward. Because he’s got the whole action star body going, with the pumped arms and the ripped abs and the bulging pectorals and what not but…it’s Adam Freaking Brody. It’s like if Alex Trebek ripped off his suit one day on Jeopardy! and was just a twitching mass of muscles under there. It’s just an explosion of ‘huh?'
I CAN'T- I DON'T...I DON'T, I CAN'T
WHAT IS THIS I DON'T EVEN
It was a fun time, to be sure. I’m not going to buy the movie or anything, but when it comes on TNT or USA or Skiffy on a Sunday afternoon in a few months I’ll be sure to avoid whatever it is I’m supposed to be doing to watch this instead. Hell, I might see it in pieces as many times as I’ve currently seen
Twister (current conservative estimates put it around the fifty mark).
