Monday 12 July 2010

Predators

SPOILERS

The short version: it's not as good as Predator.  It's probably not even as good as Predator 2.
BUT it's better than either of the Alien vs Predator movies.  No bullet-time, a semblance of characterisation, and it's fun.  Congratulations, Litvak and Finch; you are officially better writers than Paul W.S. Anderson and Shane Salerno...

Yes guys, I damn you with faint praise.  The ticks and mannerisms of some of the writing still annoy me.  Quoting pop culture dialogue annoyed the hell out of me in Medieval, and its repetition here, down to the same quotes, is like being jabbed with a stick by an annoying child.  You can construct a genre movie.  We don't need to be reminded that you've seen a lot of them; just concentrate on making this one better, because there's still some dumb stuff here.

Hanzo is a disgraced Yakuza.  So why does he turn to face the last Predator alone?  Was there something hinted at in the character which made this the right, inevitable decision for him?  I didn't see it.  Did he have nothing left to live for?  It was needless, too close an echo of Billy's last stand from Predator, though at least this time we get to see the poor bastard buy it.  Billy's demise somehow seemed inevitable, though exactly how they pulled that off I'm not sure.  The same trick doesn't work here because there's no obvious ground laid.  Losing two fingers is not a precursor to wanting to die.

A few of the story beats are what we'll generously call homages to the original, and though they're pretty scattered they'll be noticeable to fans.  Having said that, Predators never starts to become a hacked up, reverse engineered collection of Greatest Hits in the same way as Terminator Salvation.

Lawrence Fishburne channels his best Colonel Kurtz as an isolation-mad survivor, and does surprisingly well with it, because Noland is a plot-point, a late second-act crisis escalation in human form.  That Fishburne takes this device and makes him almost a character is something of a feat, and makes his demise feels like a short-change.  It's cheap and it's too darn soon.  I'll repeat my assertion that the character could have been rewritten as Dutch from Predator, a man so isolated and traumatized by what happened to his friends that he's no longer able to work with others.  It would have fit nicely with the themes of the movie and generated serious conflict with Royce.  As it stands, everyone simply follows Royce.  Seven of the world's nastiest people; amoral egotists, rapists and murderers, and not one of them bats an eyelid when Royce takes charge.

Brody as Royce is fine without ever having to stretch himself, and Topher Grace is not horribly miscast a la Spider-Man 3, in which his Eddie Brock/Venom carried all the threat of a baby rattle.  His arc is flare-firingly obvious but he does a bit with it and makes the character likable.  There's even a decent riff on the old "photo of the kids means you're going to die" cliche.

The script draft I read last year included an alternative ending with Arnold's "Dutch" Schaefer de-cloaking Predator-style and pretty much inviting Royce to join the hunting party.  Obviously Arnold nixed that by declining to cameo, but what they've replaced it with is not the original ending as written but the nothing line "Let's get off this planet" as Royce and Isabelle disappear into the jungle.
Er... how exactly?  There's leaving things open for a sequel and there's just not finishing your movie properly.  It's not such a good film that a poor ending is going to undermine it but it still feels tacked on.

Predators was never going to be one of the movies of the year, but it's a fun, partial rescue of a mythology which has been dragged through the mud by sloppy sequels.  The problem is there's nothing surprising or new.  As an audience we've been here before and, like the Predators, we're two steps ahead all the time.  Whether there's anything fresh that can done with the idea is something for Fox to ponder before they greenlight another.

*** (out of *****)

Friday 9 July 2010

Maybe you can hire the A-Team...

I know the Orange mobile ads with the "creative" executives had gotten very weak of late, but to replace them with this A-Team related product placement sequence...

Is it supposed to be post-modern?  Or is it such a ridiculously over the top, in your face marketing tie-in that you think it's post-modern because it can't possibly be this shameless?

Resident Evil: Reloaded

Maybe they can use that title for the next movie.
Just saw the trailer for the fourth(?) installment in the "franchise".

Guys, The Matrix was ELEVEN years ago.  You can quit paying visual homage.  It wasn't clever when it was new.
I thought we'd passed that phase when every action movie had to have a bullet-time style sequence.  Sigh...