AndrewBloom
CONTAINS SPOILERS6/10 5 years ago
[6.0/10] There’s a simplicity to the plot of *Predator* that’s refreshing in its way. You can boil the plot down to “Alien hunter picks off a group of mercenaries in the jungle.” There’s technically a little more to it than that, with the mildest of ruses and a false mission to contend with, but the gist of the film fits into a ten-word sentence. That’s almost remarkable in an age where every blockbuster and explosion fest needs to have some convoluted conspiracy, and fifteen twists, and a grand mystery box to try to keep the audience invested. *Predator*, by contrast, banks on the basics of its premise to carry the day.
That’s a good thing, because it ain’t much of a story otherwise. *Predator* offers the wisp of a theme about the military viewing its men as interchangeable parts, while the men themselves view one another as human beings. It paces out the inevitable deaths of everyone besides its major star and token female character to fill out the gaps between explosions and alien murders. And it teases the appearance of the titular pursuer, letting the audience get glimpses of the antagonist and his work bit by bit before he fully emerges.
But *Predator* is one feature-length excuse to have Arnold Schwarzeneggar throw down with an Intergalactic Brute, and everything beyond that feels like some combination of filler and set dressing. Director John McTiernan and Cinematographer Donald McAlpine know how to frame a shot and craft a sequence. Both absolutely know how to toss in buckets of bullets, reams of explosions, and scads of muscle-bound toughs traipsing through the jungle. And the special effects and gradual reveal of The Predator itself are an achievement in presentation and costuming.
The problem is that there’s little reason to care beyond the spectacle. Every character in the film is one-dimensional at best, more a collection of biceps and affectations than anything approaching a character with real depth. Sure, it’s cool to see an invisible enemy swoop in and catch these supposedly unstoppable badasses unawares, but when every person in the picture is a walking trope or stereotype, it’s hard to muster up much excitement or pathos or investment for characters who comes off like barely-painted cannon fodder.
The performances don’t do much to counteract that. Carl Weather is doing his level best and gives an over-the-top performance in an over-the-top feels, but the tone he strikes just cements the “G.I. Joe for nineteen-year-olds” vibe that already suffuses the film. Bill Duke manages to inject some layers into Mac, another member of the standard issue grab bag of commandos, who nonetheless provides the only bit of genuine emotional ballast in the film. And Schwarzeneggar is, for some utterly baffling reason, given boatloads of dialogue in the first two-thirds of the film, and gives a performance that anticipates Tommy Wiseau in his stilted, halting efforts to sound like a human being.
That’s partly why the film doesn't really come together until the third act. In the last half hour or so of the movie, all of Arnold’s chums are either already dead or shuffled off to safety. There’s no more middling attempts to have corny banter between the heroes-for-hire. There’s no more faux-meaningful conversations to be had about what’s right and wrong in the throes of combat. There’s no story or theme or, thank heaven, anyone for Arnold to have to talk to.
Instead, we get what amounts to an extended professional wrestling match between Dutch (Schwarzeneggar) and the Predator. It’s there that the movie plays to its strength, providing a nice cat and mouse game between the two, where each proves a worthy adversary to the other, and the film can lean into the pugilistic spectacle it’s good at.
The film might actually work better were it nothing but that last section. Toss away the failed attempts to establish character, or gesture toward a theme, or find an excuse for Arnold and company to mow down interchangeable mooks in ludicrous fashion, and you just have a neat vignette of the best-trained warrior on Earth fighting the best-trained warrior from another world. That tells a story in and of itself, one which can rely on the filmmakers’ ability to convey tension and suspense visually, and on Arnold’s physical presence and body language, which are better assets than any effort to open his mouth.
It’s just a slog to get to that point. The creature feature of an unmasked Predator is cool and creepy. The efforts of Arnold and his foe to evade and attack one another amount to an engrossing game of checkers, if not exactly a chess match. And McAlpine’s camera lurks through the jungle setting with aplomb. You just have to endure a tsunami of hokey dialogue, a bizarre game of mousetrap, and cheesy laugh from an alien who guffaws like a Bond villain to be able to enjoy it.
The best thing you can say for *Predator* is that it takes its time. Aside from a gratuitous assault on an enemy camp early in the film, McTiernan and writers Jim and John Thomas slowly unspool the dimensions of the threat facing our heroes, letting us see a little more of what the Predator can do, what the creature looks like, before it’s out in the open and unleashing its full potential.
The worst thing you can for the film is that is has no idea how to fill the time or space between Predator attacks, and can’t come up with a compelling reason the audience should care about the people falling prey to the alien’s ambushes. When the eponymous hunter isn’t actively hunting the main characters, *Predator* lives up (or down) to being an unironic version of Swarzeneggar spoofs like *McBain* and self-aware, winking self-parodies like *The Expendables* series (which borrows its name from a repeated, thudding line of dialogue in this film). It is awash in steroid-addled bodies, stock archetypes, and over-the-top firearms fetishization, ill-equipped to do anything but have its leading figures grunt and blow things up.
The greatest strength of *Predator* is its simplicity -- when the film boils down to a visual showcase and test of wills between two figures who are aesthetically striking for two very different reasons. And the greatest weakness of *Predator* is also its simplicity, the film’s complete inability to offer anything beyond its effects, aesthetics, and final fight, that might make the rest of the film deeper, smarter, or at least more entertaining than ninety stretched out minutes of “big guy go boom.”
