Predators Mini-Review And More

As part of my birthday festivities, I wanted to check out Predators as it was pretty much the only movie at the theater right now that I wanted to see other than Toy Story 3 (which I still haven't).  Even though it looked alright, I still had my reservations about it.  Would it end up sucking like the Aliens vs Predators movies did?  Will Adrien Brody be able to pull off being the lead in an action film?  Will Danny Trejo not be awesome?  Luckily, all of my worries were wiped away as Predators ended up being quite good...well, not ALL my worries.  ***Mini Spoiler - Danny Trejo is the first one to die.  :-( ***

I won't say that Predators is perfect but it is fun.  My main problem with the movie was that it took too long to get going.  Basically, you have the cast of characters (or as I like to call them "Random Assemblage of Action Stereotypes") crash landing into a jungle and spending a good half-hour trying to figure out where they are and why they're there.  Normally, this wouldn't be a problem but if you've seen a trailer or an ad on TV, you already know why so the beginning stretch just kinda feels tedious and you just want to get to the action.  Trust me, if you can make it through the beginning, you'll be handsomely rewarded.

Speaking of handsome (wow, is this going to be the gayest segue or what?), I'm sure many people's point of contention as to whether Predators would be any good was the fact that Adrien Brody was cast as the lead.  I know when that was announced, you could hear a collective "REALLY?" across the Internet.  And while I didn't really think about it all that much, I can certainly understand their concern.  Here you have Adrien Brody, a skinny actor that specializes primarily in drama and is mostly known for having a nose that takes up roughly 75% of his face, taking up the mantle that was held by Arnold Schwarzenegger before him.  Needless to say, it doesn't make sense on paper.  Thankfully, Brody does pull it off, though I'll admit I wasn't entirely convinced at the onset.  At the beginning, I was like "OK, it's just Adrien Brody with a crew cut and a gravelly voice", though I did think that if he grew some stubble and a mullet, he'd make a decent Solid Snake.  Then later on, he shows up sleeveless and showing off some guns, so I'm like "Alright, he did some work for the role.  Good for him."  Then at the end, he shows up completely shirtless (and covered in mud, just like Ah-nuld in the original) and buff as hell, so I'm like "I buy it".  It's not like he was like Christian Bale going from The Machinist to Batman Begins or like he did the 300 Workout, but it was a definite change from the normal Adrien Brody we all know.  And I'm for it.  Plus he plays kind of an egotistical dick, so it all works out in the end.

My only other real problem with the movie was that you could pretty much tell from the onset who was going to die as they didn't really flesh out most of the characters beyond "Stereotype With Gun".  You had Adrien Brody as the lead, the strong female solider as the de facto second-in-command and Topher Grace as the comedic relief (though he gets his awesome moment near the end) that you all knew were going to make it.  Then you had Danny Trejo (who really didn't get to do much), an African soldier, a Russian soldier with a giant gun, the Yakuza guy and a prison inmate.  Other than the inmate, who stepped up and became the real comic relief of the movie, you knew everyone else was there just to get killed off.  Worse yet, the African and the Russian had such thick accents that it was very difficult to figure out what they were saying, thus making me care even less.  But at least the Yakuza guy was still badass.

You'll notice that I haven't mentioned Laurence Fishburne yet and that's because he's hardly in the movie.  Don't get me wrong, Fishburne was freaking awesome, as he played the lone human survivor left on the planet of Predators and thus has gone a little crazy as his only other companion is an imaginary friend.  But he's really in the movie for about 15-20 minutes in the middle of the movie and then gone.  I just wished he was in it more often.

But with all the "negatives" out of the way, what's good about Predators?  Let me count the ways:

-Multiple decapitations
-1 spinal cord ripping (ala Sub-Zero from Mortal Kombat)
-References to the original Predator (including "C'mon, kill me!  Do it now!")
-Epic Yakuza vs Predator fight (Seriously, why couldn't we get that instead of Aliens vs Predator?)
-Crazy Laurence Fishburne
-A male/female dynamic that never turns into a love relationship just because
-Another interesting dynamic where the Predators are not only hunting humans but that they're also an advanced race that are also trying to kill off the older, weaker Predators
-A crazy inmate that shanks a Predator and calls him a "faggot" (if only it was of the "slack-jawed" variety)
-A buff mud-slathered Adrien Brody frolicking through fire...*ahem*, sorry.

While I don't think Predators will go down in the pantheon of great movies of the action genre or make many Best of 2010 lists, it is quite fun to watch.  Currently, I have Predators underneath Kick-Ass and Iron Man 2 but tied with The A-Team.  I like The A-Team and Predators about the same but for different reasons: A-Team for mindless action and Predators for gratuitous violence.  As for how it fits in with the rest of the Predator series, this incarnation is the best one since the original.  I honestly can't remember if I've even seen Predator 2, and that should say something.  Aliens vs Predator was horrible and though I haven't seen its sequel, I heard it was even worse (with the only redeeming value being the excessive gore).  So really, watch the original with Arnold, then Predators and you'll be good. 

However, some people don't really understand.  For the most part, the reviews are saying that Predators is "alright", and I tend to agree.  But the movie reviewers at Something Awful have different ideas.  Now, Something Awful is normally an awesome site but their movie reviews are shit (not counting the reviews of actual shitty movies, those are awesome).  The thing with them is I can't tell if their reviews are satirizing pretentious film-school douchebags or if they're actually pretentious film-school douchebags.  I'll post their closing thoughts and let you be the judge:

"Finally, and perhaps most abstractly, this film loses the whole point of the original. Gone is the yonic symbolism inherent in the Predators, now that their infamous vagina mouths have been reduced to a family-friendly opening. Gone is the scene in which a group of men mow down a huge section of jungle with their giant phalluses, but completely fail to nail their target. Gone is the ironic ending in which the vagina-faced Predator is crushed to death by a giant erection. The not-so-subtle exploration into the nature of male penile fortitude and emasculation is shattered and rebuilt as a dumb series of pointless events. Predators explores a much less interesting or original premise, choosing to side with the "humans are the real monsters" message that we've seen so many times before. Even that I wouldn't mind so much, except that somewhere along the way, they forgot to have them some fun."

Really now?  I just made multiple homosexual insinuations toward wanting to mud-wrestle Adrien Brody inside a ring of fire...yet that entire paragraph sounds 100x gayer than that.  Congrats.

Anyway, for those that don't know, this past Thursday was my birthday and I spent most of this weekend celebrating it.  I didn't really get much but I'm glad to have spent it with the people I care about.  I did manage to snag a few things on a trip to Best Buy yesterday though.  As a birthday present, I convinced my friend to buy me Ghost Rider.  I was gonna buy it anyway but when he offered to buy me something, I let him pay for that partly because I didn't want to do it myself.  When I saw it in theaters, I didn't really enjoy it but then again, I wasn't on the huge Nic Cage kick that I'm on now so maybe I'll appreciate it more now...for all the wrong reasons.  Also, I picked up a 4-Pack of Ninja movies for like $7, just for one movie called Ninja: The Final Duel.  You see, a few years back I picked up a kung-fu double feature of Black Samurai (starring Jim Kelly!) and Shaolin Dolemite.  That's right, Shaolin Dolemite.  Basically, Rudy Ray Moore had found a random kung-fu movie (probably on the sole basis that it had a black guy in it) and gave it a cheap-ass "Kung Pow" treatment by overdubbing the scenes from the original movie and adding in some of his own, editing them together Godfrey Ho-style.  But the scenes from the original movie were so messed up that I just had to track the movie down for myself, especially when I had found that the scenes that Rudy Ray Moore DIDN'T use were even more messed up!  He just left in the ones about a black guy kicking ass and nude female ninjas, but he didn't mention anything about ninjas surfing on giant spiders!  But now, I finally have this movie in my possession.

Also, since I needed some new music to listen to, I picked up "The Underworld Regime" by Ov Hell.  I had mentioned this a while back when it had come out and even though I've only listened to it about once or twice, the snap judgment I made remains the same.  Basically, it sounds just like Shagrath from Dimmu Borgir singing for Gorgoroth...because that's basically what it is.  And it's great.  I just like the idea of a Black Metal "supergroup", especially in a genre where people are in multiple bands anyway.  And though I didn't find it at Best Buy, I just procured "Noir", the new album from William Control (aka Wil Francis from Aiden) and...I'm glad I didn't pay money for it.  I mean, it's not really bad, it's just not as good as his previous album "Hate Culture".  Plus, he really dropped the ball by covering Elvis Presley's "Can't Help Falling In Love With You" as an acoustic song when he mostly does electronic synth-goth-pop (?).  An electronic version of that song would've been great!  Maybe I just need to listen to it again but there were only a couple of songs that stood out.

Anyway, that's all for me right now.  If I can get my motivation to do stuff in this abysmal heat, maybe I'll have a new article done up this week.  I have a poll up for what movie I should review next and, considering the subject matter, I might make it a recurring feature on Sarcasmatron.  But until then, I actually have some movies to watch!

Nash out.