-

It has been a long and tiresome hunting season for the Predator; two films and two rotten-to-the core crossovers later, and the titular alien menace is still being called up by Hollywood to don the ol’ metal faceplate and perm the dreadlocks. The good news for our alien trophy-seekers is that Nimrod Antal’s Predators is as close as they have come to a worthwhile fight since the original. Not as perfectly paced or creatively charged as John McTiernan’s 1987 action classic, Predators is still up for giving die-hard audience members a chase worth getting in line for.

Producer Robert Rodriguez has long talked up his concept for a third Predator film, with the humans being beamed directly to an alien game preserve where they could be hunted at leisure by faster, shinier, more menacing variations of the same sinister species that provoked Schwarzenneger all those years ago. As it turns out, this idea works well for rebooting the franchise and wiping away the sting of Predator 2 and the dual tragedy of Alien Vs. Predator and AVP: Requiem (cue snickering). The script even remembers those events from Predator 87, but mercifully it seems amnesiac on the rest of the lot.

Falling one by one out of the sky, a varied and mysterious team of death-mongers—Yakuza, death-row inmates, mercs, and a wayward scientist—find themselves in a place that looks similar to a jungle on Earth. Adjusting to their surroundings and each other, it isn’t long before the revelation of multiple moons and vicious, other-worldly fauna cause them to question exactly where in the universe they are.

When they start getting gruesomely picked off by shadowy creatures in the dark of the jungle, the movie ramps up and delivers the thrills and kills the faithful have been waiting for. Those looking forward to intergalactic bloodshed won’t be disappointed; spinal cords are ripped, green blood runs as freely as red, and there’s even time for some predator on predator violence. When it comes to full-bore mayhem, the contained hunt of Predators easily bests the near apocalyptic onslaught of other blockbusters.

The cast pulled together here does a commendable job of portraying individual grit and together as a team, begrudging endurance as a fighting unit. Danny Trejo, Alice Braga, and Topher Grace sound like an unlikely group, and that in many ways is the point. With Brody’s loner mercenary at the forefront, this eclectic assembly isn’t by accident.

The predators have rigged the jungle, rallied their alien bloodhounds, and even remembered to internally snag their prey by hand-picking not just for battle aptitude but for disparity that might detonate them from within. When Laurence Fishburne’s crazed survivor, too long hiding out in the jungle shows up, Antal and company explore another dimension to the picture that focuses on the predators themselves and the curious tribalism that defines their species.

As an action director I really dig the style of Nimrod Antal, but I’d much prefer to see him tackling films in his own country again, since his debut, Kontroll, is far more powerful and hard-hitting than anything he’s done over here. Antal is the very definition of a journeyman director, taking big gigs and doing a solid but often unremarkable job of them. He gets the pacing, the special effects, and the character interaction down perfectly, but he’s also not bringing anything extra or inspiring to the table. This is less his fault and more the work of the scripters who came before him and decided to write Predators so closely to the original film that almost any legitimate suspense or ingenuity has been wiped away.

The monsters are well designed, and the alien critters who run down the survivors for their Predator masters are believable and threatening. Breaking the predators into two camps, one an older, more worn down caste (the dude who fought Arnold was one of these) and the other a virile and more aggressive contingent, is pure fan boy pandering all the way. Here’s the thing, though. It works.

Adrien Brody, who seems miscast at first, gives his mercenary a welcome sense of cold humanity. Physically, he’s not as imposing as the big Austrian who tussled with these guys the first go-round, but he’s toned up not just his body but also his adrift nice-guy persona to give a turn as a man who doesn’t need to fight the predators with brawn if he can utilize his wits and the predators own cultural hang-ups against them. It’s never going to come down to a one on one fight this time, so Brody stacks the deck in another way, and it leads to the goofy fun third act that betrays the slow build of the earlier sections at the same time it’s giving us just what we want from a movie about alien game hunters tracking hapless human prey.

Rating: