Similar to the original, the prey in Predators are human characters who, in any other movie, would be the aggressors (in fact, the movie’s title could refer to the humans as readily as the aliens hunting them). The story begins with them literally in mid-freefall after having been thrown out of an aircraft, which makes for a startling opening and also establishes an immediate sense of danger, unease, and mystery. Adrien Brody, who appears to be on a sci-fi bender with this and his recent role in Splice, plays the requisite alpha male, a special-ops vet named Royce who would, of course, much rather work on his own. However, as there is safety in numbers, he reluctantly agrees to team up with the others who have been inexplicably jettisoned into the alien jungle. These include a Chechnian soldier (Oleg Taktarov), a drug cartel enforcer (Danny Trejo), a serial killer (Walton Goggins), a Sierra Leone death squad member (Mahershalalhashbaz Ali), a yakuza hitman (Louis Ozawa Changchien), an American army soldier (Alice Braga), and a sarcastic doctor (Topher Grace).

Once everyone is in place and the setting is established, first-time screenwriters Alex Litvak and Michael Finch follow the narrative’s inherent logic, which decrees that the Predators kill off the major characters one by one, although not always in the order you might expect, until the group is whittled down to a few hearty souls who must set up a fiery last stand against them. It takes a while for the characters to fully realize what they’re in for, although there are clues along the way, including a corpse of a special ops soldier surrounded by jungle-crafted booby traps that the Predators managed to avoid, and Laurence Fishburne as a crazed survivor of a previous hunting expedition. Not surprisingly, the characters don’t have a whole lot of character to them; they are defined primarily by their different backgrounds and countries of origin, and because no one knew anyone else prior to arrival, the movie doesn’t have the underlying boil of macho posturing that Arnold Schwarzenegger and Carl Weathers brought to the original (bear in mind that that movie’s most indelible image did not involve the Predator, but rather a close-up of the two men’s bulging biceps as they shook hands, an event that had less to do with greeting and more to do with one-upmanship).

In what is essentially the Schwarzenegger role, Brody was an interesting casting choice, as he brings a fierce intelligence and drive to go along with a beefed-up body and hardened countenance. He is quite convincing as a soldier of fortune whose single-minded goal of survival at all costs often puts him at odds with the others and doesn’t always make him immediately likable. The other characters emerge as little more than fodder for the Predators’ various weapons of death (which involve both destructive lasers and old-fashioned blades), with the exception of Topher Grace’s doctor, who is so seriously out of place among all these hardened killers that it doesn’t take an expert in narrative economy to realize that there’s more to him than meets the eye. Director Nimrod Antal, who first made international waves with the Hungarian film Kontroll (2003) before directing the superior horror-thriller Vacancy (2007), brings a dash of much-needed style to the proceedings without cutting too deep into the story’s back-to-basics primitivism (note, particularly, the artistry with which he uses high-angle shots to spice up the yakuza’s battle with a Predator). And, if that is the extent of your expectations, Predators won’t disappoint.

Copyright ©2010 James Kendrick

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