Predators
Directed by Nimrod Antal
Written by Michael Finch and Alex Litvak
Starring Adrien Brody, Laurence Fishburne, Topher Grace, Danny Trejo

Actually, it was.

Though Predators still felt like a “mixed bag” movie to me.  It did some things right, a lot of things just okay, but thankfully, it never really went in the wrong direction at any point in time.  And this is coming from a guy who was an Aliens and Predator fanatic when he was younger.

If anything, I should’ve been heavily critical after the debacle that was Alien vs Predator: Requiem.  Now I’ll admit, I didn’t have my hopes up walking into the theater Saturday night, but I was still pleasantly surprised and left feeling satisfied after I watched this movie.

First off, thank you, Robert Rodriguez, for finally putting some solid, decent actors on screen when it comes to one of these movies.  It isn’t the ’80s or the ’90s anymore, people.  The Predators (Aliens, it doesn’t really matter at this point) can not carry these movies by themselves.  They need a convincing human factor, which Adrien Brody, Laurence Fishburne, and even that one dude from the upcoming Machete movie provide (come on, if Rodriquez produced it, you shouldn’t be surprised that one of his go to guys ends up being cast for a supporting role).  This definitely helped the movie along, which means we weren’t sitting around for twenty minutes saying, “I wish the Predators would hurry up and get on screen already.”

Another thing that impressed me was the cinematography.

Wait—what?

Yes, cinematography.  Bear with me on this one, because the movie was actually quite beautiful.  The director did a fantastic job choosing the locations, and he was able to make our world look convincingly alien without much effort.  I found myself many times just admiring the scenery while the plot developed and the human characters interacted.  Now insert a nice “jump straight to the action” opening, some cool, fresh ideas that added to the Predator mythology (alien hunting dogs for the win), and a Predator versus Predator fight sequence all helped to make for a pleasant movie experience when I was expecting another train wreck.

But then there’s the plot.  It didn’t add anything new, and most of the time, it felt like the first Predator movie just set on an alien planet.  In fact, the whole movie sort of came across like a homage to the original film.  There was a guy toting a mini gun, some obvious dialogue references, and even the “watch as each human gets picked off one by one” scenario which played out during the entire movie.  Then there’s Topher Grace, who just did not work for this film.  He was the odd ball of the group, and he never fit in convincingly with the rest of the cast.  Add in the ho hum, set up for a possible sequel ending, and you have a movie that just never quite clicked on all cylinders.

Was I happy I saw it?  Yes.  Was it a great movie?  No.

Predators was average, but it’s still something a fan of both the Aliens and the Predator movies should definitely go see.  It was entertaining, and at least Twentieth Century Fox took the time (and the money) to finally get one of these storied franchises headed back in the right direction.

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