Let me tell you a story. It’s only very brief, so don’t worry.
When I was very young I used to love sea food, especially prawns and mussels. Whenever I went on holiday with my family (which was invariably camping in France in those days) I would always have prawns and mussels. I used to look forward to eating them, and actually got quite excited about the prospect of eating them. I used to chomp and slurp those salty prawns and mussels down like nobody’s business (as, indeed, it was). But one day that all changed. I must’ve eaten a bad batch because I was suddenly and violently ill after eating a massive platter of prawns and mussels. Possibly my expectations were too high and I was too excited to dig in, but I was sick for hours that seemed like days and days that seemed like years. In many ways I have never recovered, and I haven’t eaten a mussel since. In fact, the mere smell or sight of them now brings back that nauseous feeling in the pit of my stomach and I have to leave the room.
Why do I tell you this (true) story? Because it almost exactly mirrors my engagement with the Predator franchise. Right down to the salty, back of the throat vomiting and gut churning terror.
MESSY SPLATTERED VOMIT
I’ve ranted before about my misgivings and anxieties about Robert ‘Let’s Blow It Up With Wisecracks’ Rodriguez getting involved with this series, and you can read them in my Clanking And Exploding article earlier. Yet still, against every fibre of my being, I sat in the cinema with a mixed feeling of excitement and nausea as I waited for it to start.
I wish I hadn’t. My time would have been better spent eating duck penis or being trampled by bulls.
Frankly this is a big messy splattered vomit of a movie, with all sorts of half-digested ideas slopping about all over the place like foul bile. Not the sort of appetising morsel you’d want to guzzle. More the sort of half-formed slop you’d think twice before feeding a starving mangy cat, and then wouldn’t. For every one thing these idiot filmmakers got right, they managed to get a dozen things wrong.
It seemed almost as if the filmmakers had a total misunderstanding of what had made the first two movies (and yes, I said the FIRST TWO MOVIES and that INCLUDES Predator 2) so good. They made numerous and idiotic attempts (as every pricklet that gets their hands on this franchise seems to do) to add to and evolve what we’d seen earlier, but only succeeded in making it into a tiresome spectacle of repeated explosions and resolutely ungripping awfulness.
A TOTAL ABSENCE OF PULPY JOY
Firstly, despite the masterstroke of actually using the music from the first film (albeit totally ineptly) the film never ever recovered from the totally ludicrous and downright lazy premise it was burdened with. Supposedly in an attempt to be the worst plot of all time, a bunch of totally unsympathetic and uninterestingly generic “characters” were literally dropped out of the sky into a jungle on a planet that was apparently a hunting ground for the Predator creatures. And as you watch the film that is as boring as it sounds. I’d rather just have watched a static shot of the jungle for two hours with Alan Silvestri’s wonderful music playing over the top.
The cast and characters were totally flat and as forgettable as a Damien Rice song, the tone of the film totally incorrect. The pleasurable pulpy joy of the first two movies was entirely absent, replaced instead by an overly serious attitude and confusing chaos of events that were as inexplicable as they were irritating. The first encounter with the monsters was just a confused blur of uselessness, shoddily executed and bringing back bad memories of the beyond awful AVP movies and making me wish I could send my poor eyeballs back to hell where they belong. The final battle was equally confounding and felt like watching one of your worst enemies playing a video game and molesting your kid sister whilst you lay in foul sewage with a bad hangover recalling that last night you killed your own grandparents by bludgeoning them to death with your beloved family dog (which you had also molested). People around me in the theatre laughed at the sight of Adrien Brody minus a shirt. There was no tension, no terror, no spark.
SCAVENGERS
They were always going to be treading a fine line with drawing Predators so closely to the first film, making it vulnerable to unfavourable comparisons. The jackasses! Like a decomposing corpse riddled with maggots, this new film was riddled with references to Predator that went beyond being mere references and instead made me think the filmmakers thought they were in some way ‘improving’ on what the original had so effortlessly achieved. No such luck. Don’t reference a great movie unless you can better it. And then shut up.
One of the clearest signposts of the muddle that this film was is that we had to be constantly told by the onscreen characters what was happening! This is not because we’re stupid, but because the film was such a confusing splurge of half-baked ideas and illogical conclusions that you would need to be a mindreader to understand what they thought they were trying to achieve and follow the bizarre turns of events. I particularly enjoyed the hysterical cry of ‘He’s a scavenger!’ This was definitely the best line in the movie (partly because it came totally out of the blue and was just so peculiar), but it’s no way near ‘I ain’t got time to bleed’ or any of the other genius moments from the earlier films. Try again, idiots. Or actually- don’t. Don’t ever try again.
EYEBALL ABUSE
To be fair, there were vague scattered points early on in the film that made you think (hope) it was going to pull itself together, but it never really cohered into anything and as soon as you started to get your hopes up then something totally stupid would happen, like the introduction of new ‘hunting dog’ creatures that looked like teenage Slipknot fans, or a semi-civilised exchange between human and monster that was like something out of Brief Encounter. Or an idiotic swordfight in a cornfield. Or Jennifer Aniston singing a showtune. True, I made that last one up, but it could have slotted in nicely amid the gibberish and irrational idiocy being gummed over our eyeballs.
IN SUMMARY
So essentially this was a film of unfathomable choices, useless new ideas, and a final nail in the coffin of a series I once loved as a youngster. It’s dead for me now. I’m not watching any more of these movies. I’ve taken all the disappointment I can have! The door on my boyish dreams has been forever slammed shut.
Unless they actually get around to making that Pride and Predator movie I was hearing so much about of course.
GAME OVER.
Predators: 2/10
Bitterly Disappointed Regards
Biolab
Pablum from the (bio)Lablum 