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: ★★★½☆ 

Queens of Langkasuka is one big mess. Spreading palace intrigue, ancient world power struggles, naval warfare, martial arts, sorcery, sea beasties and roving pirates over a sagging 133 minutes, Langkasuka has no idea how to manage any of it. Fortunately for the audience, this high-profile Thai fantasy happens to be an entertaining and enjoyable mess.

Borrowing elements of Old Hollywood  adventures like 7th Voyage of Sinbad, and taking a cue from Pirates of the Caribbean and other big budget American popcorn pics, Langkasuka marks a step forward for Thai cinema. Recently, the scene has mostly been cluttered with raucous martial arts movies and tepid horror films. Queens is on a grander scale than anything I’ve previously seen out of the country, and for the most part it accomplishes what it sets out to do. I wasn’t bored, and that’s much more than I can say for several of our own big profile ‘blockbusters’.

Director Nonzee Nimbitur has said that he was trying to create a film that homaged the matinee adventures of his youth. I’m not sure if he’s talking about American films, or Thai films, or something else altogether, but I see what he has done and think he achieved his goal. This is exactly the kind of film that would have proved comforting on a sunday afternoon in those now hazy days of my childhood. It’s quite long, with most of the action coming in regulated bursts towards the opening, middle and end of the film; all the rest of the 2-plus-hours providing the narrative ‘meat’.

As a kid, there was something marvelous about a movie that you could watch breathlessly for 10 to 15 minutes, and then go off and play and return a hour later and the hero was still on his quest and you felt like you hadn’t missed anything. When you are 5 or 6, that sort of thing passes for epic. Langkasuka feels like that. At a film fest like Fantasia or a similar venue, the movie is an entertaining distraction; a pleasant bit of fluff plumping out a packed schedule of often relentlessly grim fare. However, it doesn’t quite work as a stand-alone movie. Its ambition is admirable, but its length and pacing are not.

Queens tells the story of the island kingdom of Langkasuka which comes under the threat of an enclave of pirates who have a powerful sorcerer on their side that gives them an advantage. In order to turn the tables, the island residents, including a masked captain of the guard, a young man who has the sorcerer’s ability for Dolum(which I assume makes him a Dolumite), and the titular queens band together with the help of a magical hermit to retrieve a powerful cannon from the ocean floor. Yep, that’s the quest, or as close as I could make of it, anyway. It seems like it would be a dense script, but I imagine the film being created not from detailed notes but by a group of men with a checklist comprised of four things; sword-fights, magical sorcerer fights, boat fights, and sea-beast fights. Again, when I was 7 I thought if you had any three of those things you would have a perfect movie.

In between all of the fighting there is an attempt to flesh out the main character, the young warrior who posesses the art of Dolum, which is essentially a combination of The Force and whatever power Aquaman has. The story attempts to draw out the seductive and destructive nature of Dolum, showing how it can corrupt even those of pure intent. Well, that basically makes it like every other magical power in a fantasy film.

We don’t want time spent on telling us how it works because with Dolum, the draw is in what it does. See, a trained Dolumite at Thetan Level 20 can communicate with and control sea creatures. All kinds of sea creatures; from ordering up an underwater ballet of jellyfish to sending whales like warm-blooded homing missiles aimed at the enemy ships, a Dolum sorcerer is a force to be reckoned with. Which actually poses the question, “Why mess with the freakin’ cannon, when you have such a potentially awesome force on your side and the enemy isn’t above using their own similar wizard?’

If you did that, the film would be twice as costly because of the numerous CGI effects and we wouldn’t get the scads of hand-to-hand or foot-to-mouth pirate battles, the scenes of cannons firing ingeni0us weaponry over a cliff and onto waiting ships, or those thrilling bits where the Langkasukans don Daedalus-style bird wings and swoop down upon their enemies. Ultimately, after wrestling with the hero’s dilemma of whether or not to use his ability, and learning from a mangy old Dolum master, the Fish-Prince decides to enter the fray and use his sonar howls to break bad on the pirates. Cue another excessively long battle scene and then the obligatory happy ending.

Like I said before, I was never bored during Langkasuka, but I did grow restless from time to time, and when the movie ended I felt like I had been more or less watching an overly long highlight’s reel of a television series. Not everything came together, the drama was heavily truncated but then the action seemed abrupt because of its placement in the story. The sets were exquisite and show a level of detail and craft that is commendable. I loved all the wacky elements like the whale attacks, the manta-ray riding, the immense cannon perched on the edge of the cliff and the batty magician in the cave. In the end though, I felt like I had just had a candy buffet. It tasted good at the time, and I was perfectly content for the first twenty minutes, but by the end the stomach ache was setting in.

So, I offer up a challenge to any American distributors who might get their hands on Langkasuka. Don’t waste your time with a theatrical release, but send it to television. It’s far too simplistic on a story level and too primitive on a technical level to impress the modern American film audience, but it did remind me of the crazy and off-kilter live-action programs I used to watch on Saturday mornings and weekday afternoons. Take Langkasuka, break it up into several half-hour installments and I think you would have something worthwhile on your hands. All the pieces are there, it’s just summoning them that gets to be the trick.

Rating: ★★★☆☆ 

All of you disaster movie junkies better listen up, because here’s a new featurette on the making of 2012. It’s not just the making of the newest Ronald Emmerich film, but of the special effects that go into the film. In actuality it’s just centering on the special effects of the tidal waves that envelop the Earth. The film, starring John Cusack and Amanda Peet, blasts into theaters on November 13th. If your curious as to see how it came out looking so great so far, check out the featurette below:

Max Payne was not what I was expecting. I went into the theater looking for a passable story with some in your face violence and a typical Mark Wahlberg solid performance that would be worth watching – but not worth owning on DVD. I came out of the theater totally excited to see this movie again.

Wahlberg brings the video game character Payne to life in this gripping story of murder and mayhem in New York. If you’ve played the game, you’ll be pleasantly surprised that, contrary to the trailer depiction, this movie follows the storyline pretty well.

Max Payne is on the hunt for justice after the killing of his family. His sparse clues lead him to some junkies and some crazy dudes spouting Norse mythology. Combine this with other murders that are taking place, mix in some mob complications and add a dose of demons and you get one hell of a ride.

From the opening scenes you’re struck with an acute sense of anticipation that never really lets up throughout the movie. Whether Max is figuring out a new connection or running in a rain of bullets, this movie doesn’t slow down.

With a great cast including Mila Kunis (Forgetting Sarah Marshall), Chris O’Donnell (Vertical Limit) and Beau Bridges (Stargate series) the movie is produced and directed by John Moore (Behind Enemy Lines and Flight of the Phoenix). Filming is dark and has the graphic novel feel you would expect. It also has some amazing special effects that were introduced in the game that really come alive in the movie and leave you wanting more.

I appreciated a couple things in particular about this movie that I had questions about when I saw the trailer. The first was that there was no nudity. There was the opportunity and even an expectation in one scene and yet the director left it out. I think it’s refreshing to see movies like this stand on their own without the need to add something they think the teens and twenty something men this movie is aimed at will be drooling for. And the second thing is the way in which the demonic presence is included. While I still had some questions as I left the movie about their portrayal and purpose, it wasn’t the overwhelming storyline that it looked like it might be. Instead it was intriguing and left me hoping for a sequel.

If you’re a fan of the game or of action movies in general, Max Payne won’t disappoint. And don’t be disappointed in yourself later for leaving the theater before the credits finish…

Rating: ☆☆☆☆☆