Movie Review: Predators

by KYW's Bill Wine

Eight people are parachuted into a jungle with no memory of how they got there and no idea of why. What's going on here?

That's the way that Predators opens and it's an intriguing kickoff, even if the eventual set of explanations and action climax fail to live up to the promise of the premise in this sorta-sequel.

Predator was a 1987 science fiction action thriller starring Arnold Schwarzenegger that was followed three years later by the Danny Glover-headlining Predator 2 and by several forgettable crossover projects (Aliens vs. Predator and Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem).

Predators works as a standalone story, even though it's being marketed as a sequel to the original, which it resembles but barely references these 23 years later.  That is to say, Predators is not to Predator as Aliens was to Alien.

Regardless, the result is a lean and muscular, nightmarish thriller, a paranoid adventure with a mild surprise or two up its B-movie sleeve.  We know that there will be loss of life and we're mildly curious about who will and won't buy it, but we find ourselves rooting for at least some of these characters to get out of there in one piece.

In this formulaic action-adventure thriller, a group of mercenaries -- some soldiers, some criminals, some both, all soldiers of misfortune -- discover, as we do, that they are game for the title characters, who are aliens training as hunters.

Adrien Brody (right) is Royce, who leads the team of elite warriors/expert killers in a jungle on an alien planet.  So, yes, the hunters do indeed become the hunted, and they're hunted like big game by the titular aliens on safari, who hunt so that they can evolve as killers.

What the humans soon realize is that they've been brought here as prey by a merciless race of predators, a species that does not seem to have room for members who are not predatory.  If they exist, we never meet them.

The ones we do meet are not only relentless hunters and killers, but they are able to employ a cloaking camouflage device that allows them to see without being seen -- which comes kind of handy in hand-to-claw combat.

Alice Braga plays an Israeli sniper and Topher Grace a doctor who doesn't seem to fit in with the others around him, who are played by, among others, Danny Trejo, Oleg Taktarov, and Walton Goggins.

Director Nimrod Antal (Vacancy, Armored), working from a respectable screenplay by Alex Litvak and Michael Finch, doesn't ask much of his cast, although Brody looks right at home in this venture into actioner territory and Braga demonstrates her considerable presence.

Robert Rodriguez, who took a shot at a similar script many years ago and is one of the film's producers, keeps the CGI stuff to a minimum, but there's still too much of it.  That is, once the onscreen alien creatures start casually appearing, the air runs out of the film's balloon in a real hurry.

But we've been sufficiently diverted and entertained to that point so as not to mind too much, and fans of the series will find that this entry comes the closest of the four followups thus far to at least suggest the allure of the original.

Which is why we'll attack 2½ stars out of 4.   If only the editors of Predators could have found a way to make Act III as captivating as Act I.