{"id":5344,"date":"2010-07-09T04:26:31","date_gmt":"2010-07-09T08:26:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.regrettablesincerity.com\/?p=5344"},"modified":"2010-07-14T02:22:32","modified_gmt":"2010-07-14T06:22:32","slug":"predators","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/?p=5344","title":{"rendered":"Predators"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"After learning that I disliked his horror movie, a director at a film festival spent two days trying to confront me. I tried to be nice about it, complimenting the things I did <\/em>enjoy such as the cinematography and how much he was able to get out of his obviously limited budget. He pestered me for a few minutes before my politeness fa\u00e7ade began to crack. Eventually, I told him that the numerous problems started with the screenplay and his overly muddled storyline and how, in the end most of it seemed fairly random, just an excuse for predictable jump scares and overacting. He wasn\u2019t used to the directness, so he started insulting me in every way he could think of, before stopping in his tracks to question my concerns with his film. Since it had been 2 days and 7 films since I had seen his movie, I had to refer to my notes, and as I went point by point, he tried to convince me I was wrong. Eventually, in his need to dismiss me and prove that I must be some sort of idiot, he blurted out, \u201cWell you just didn\u2019t understand the mythology.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"Nimrod Antal\u2019s Predators<\/em> has an equally muddled mythology, requiring more of the viewer than the script provides. Ignoring the more interesting elements of Predator 2<\/em><\/span><\/a>, which began to explore who the Predators were, their history and what exactly they wanted, suggests that Antal and producer Robert Rodriguez (whose kid in a genre candy store personality is all over Predators<\/em>) dropped the ball by simply embracing standard low-budget action clich\u00e9s and eschewing palatable backstory for the flimsy characters.<\/p>\n

But Antal and Rodriguez did remember to include lots of self-consciously dumb dialogue that reflect their stylistic choices, that of a pared-down rules-don\u2019t-apply version of a goofy Sam Raimi film, especially in the Crank<\/em>-style opening of Adrien Brody emerging out of unconsciousness just as he\u2019s falling to his death, thousands of feet in the air. It\u2019s both an unsettling, disorienting moment, and a completely ridiculous one, especially when it\u2019s revealed that there are bodies dropping from the sky all over the place, as that\u2019s the way the Predators introduce their planet to the kidnapped captives.<\/p>\n

\"\"Whoever is able to navigate their parachutes and the trees below without benefit of decapitation, gets to participate in the Predators\u2019 game. That the myriad of macho military types selected are the prey shouldn\u2019t be surprising to anyone who has seen the movie\u2019s trailer or finished the third grade. We get various one-named characters, all fighting different wars on Earth, all as racially mixed as a gang in a Death Wish<\/em> movie (you must have one African with an attitude, one Yakuza, one Israeli freedom fighter, one redneck on death row, one Mexican gang member, and a burly Russian with a helicopter mini-gun to take this ride).<\/p>\n

Brody does his best Clint Eastwood\/Snake Plissken impression (yes, there is such a thing as good<\/em> miscasting), but he knows what kind of movie he\u2019s in, and you can see him still working on his \u201ctough guy\u201d faces even when he\u2019s in the background of a shot. Walton Goggins never puts down his ignorant hillbilly mug for a refill (on Justified <\/em>and The Shield<\/em>, he does it better than anyone else); he\u2019s always full of idiocy and misplaced excitement (\u201cif we get off this planet, I\u2019m going to do so<\/em> much cocaine\u201d). Laurence Fishburne, who, along with Danny Trejo, completes the B-movie heaven of casting, has a lot of fun making Apocalypse Now <\/em>references and acting like a loon, and <\/em>he gets the best entrance in the movie. The silent Yakuza (Louis Ozawa Changchien) gets a mano-a-Predator samurai sword battle amongst billowing weeds, in a scene surely swiped from a fuzzy memory of Japanese Baby Cart movies.<\/p>\n

\"\"The Japanese influence isn\u2019t limited to sword fights, the criminals and violent miscreants fighting unknown monsters was done on a much lower budget in Ry\u00fbhei Kitamura\u2019s Versus<\/em>. And while watching Predators<\/em> there\u2019s no avoiding being reminded of Cube<\/em>, with the isolation with narratively useful strangers (Topher Grace has a badly written and confusing role as a doctor), conspiracy theories and \u201care we dead?\u201d and \u201cis this hell?\u201d thought bubbles. But those are just story similarities, and what Antal and Rodriguez have managed to do is make a sillier, larger budgeted, outer-space version of Walter Hill\u2019s masterpiece of tension and Deliverance<\/em> paranoia, Southern Comfort<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Of course, I admit to having a bias, since Southern Comfort<\/em> is one of the best of a sub-genre I can\u2019t help but enjoy: That of violent strangers, trapped, and being attacked by an unknown outside force (think Assault on Precinct 13<\/em>). And so Predators<\/em>, despite its many flaws, the pacing is especially wobbly in the second half, and though the film is a bit long there\u2019s obviously a lot of deleted material that would clear up a lot of third act problems (Grace\u2019s character is always there to stop the film dead in its tracks), is awfully entertaining idiocy*.<\/p>\n

\"\"Rodriguez and Antal manage to keep Predators <\/em>marvelously moronic while throwing a bone to the fans of the first film; by making musical and visual allusions to it (Alice Braga\u2019s token female character is a dead ringer for Elpidia Carrillo\u2019s refugee role in Predator<\/em>). While the up-close fighting is more WWE, which was what sunk Alien vs. Predator<\/em> (which is notably disregarded in Predators<\/em>), the decapitations and removed limbs continue the sweaty, homoerotic feel of the 1987 film. If anything, Predators <\/em>continues a tradition: In the first film Arnold told the Predator he was \u201cone ugly motherfucker.\u201d In Predator 2<\/em>, Danny Glover calls a Predator \u201cPussyface\u201d (referring to his rather vaginal facial construction). And in Predators<\/em>, Walton Goggins calls a Predator a \u201cSpace faggot.\u201d That certainly makes me look forward to another sequel, where perhaps a character can comment on the Predator\u2019s penchant for dread locks, and I can learn some new epithets for Jamaicans.<\/p>\n

* Even if we don\u2019t learn anything about the Predators as beings, other than the fact that they get their own personal spaceships, controllable through their digital wristwatches.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After learning that I disliked his horror movie, a director at a film festival spent two days trying to confront me. I tried to be nice about it, complimenting the things I did enjoy such as the cinematography and how much he was able to get out of his obviously limited budget. He pestered me […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,15],"tags":[5188,3798,6622,3841,2011,6618,1296,247,4619,2623,153,79,1695,6619,677,2960,3152,363,1173,497,3952,6629,996,1017,3810,4084,667,6625,2987,242,1303,6624,6620,2122,6628,573,4600,6616,1873,6631,440,1302,4093,310,6312,1523,5189,246,813,431,436,6621,276,3275,6627,6630,918,4096,3158,3710,6617,48,1558,6623,6626,6632,3872,785],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5344"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5344"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5344\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5344"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5344"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5344"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}