Beginning with a crash landing out of the sky, Royce (Adrien Brody, “King Kong”) just barely manages to put the pieces together while seven other strangers around him drop in – a toss-up of mercenaries, an African warlord, a death row inmate, a Japanese Yakuza, the unmistakable presence of Dannny Trejo, an Israeli markswoman and a baby-faced doctor (that would be Topher Grace). It’s like “Survivor” with high stakes, but moreover, the script has Joseph Conrad’s classic story “The Most Dangerous Game,” also an entertaining and enduring 1932 movie as well as the inspiration for two dozen and a half movies over a hundred years, is written all over this sequel.
Yes, it’s perhaps the fourth sequel if anyone’s counting but good enough that it should be considered the first worthy continuation since Arnold Schwarzenegger fought the Stan Winston creation of alien-prawn / jungle-warrior back in the 1987 “Predator.” (You had the “Alien vs. Predator” films that wandered between the monotonous attacks.) The strong female heroine of this film is Isabel (Alice Braga, “I Am Legend”), the former Israeli markswoman, and she is a sharp-shooter as well as a girl with heart and active compass of loyalty. Isabel makes resounding efforts to raise morale amongst the troop.
Instead of an insistent mash-up of action scenes, the movie develops suspense as well as geography, allowing the characters time to discover their surroundings as well as the details of their circumstances. As an addition to this installment, there are rabid Predator dogs that rush the humans this time, six of them armed and ready to shoot these creatures in the eyes. The dogs are deliberately rushed out, and it becomes apparent to Royce that there is a game preserve strategy attempted by the villain Predators. These encounters are photographed in a fluid and comprehensive manner that lends the film its potency. The first noticeable CGI shot, a wide-angle reveal over innumerable humps of mountains, happens to be an awesome shot.
Popping in unannounced halfway in is a surprise actor appearance, a thirty-year veteran of movies, whom should not be mentioned other to say it momentarily feels like an Alec Guinness or Michael Caine role. Except that the encounter is a little more spooked out than you would hope for or would anticipate. From that point on, the action is very unremitting, the Predators attacking in ones or twos, the humans running for cover. In the film’s most amusing one-on-one encounter, the Yakuza engages in a swordfight with a Predator.
Enough background story becomes available about the Predators this time out, but it never convinces that these creatures are sophisticated enough to develop their own machinery and artillery. It’s possible to overlook this if you are able to acknowledge that the Predators have confiscated machinery and war ammunition from humans and other species from over the galaxy, and have adaptively learned how to use the technology competently. The primary interest of the filmmakers is to provide whippy sci-fi and hard and fast action, and they do all of this well and with a good sense of photography and editing composition.
If the film is not an entire orbital success it is that the film disappoints in a variety of small details. I never believed, for instance, in one of the human’s sudden shift of behavior in the final act. Somebody out there in the audience will find a large gaping hole in the plot, surely there is somebody, but perhaps you can suspend your disbelief long enough to not find it until after the movie is over. Until then, terrific action is back, in a film that is an echo to the ’80’s – when action choreography made relative sense.
Go to the official site at http://www.predators-movie.com/
Grade: B
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