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Predators: This Sexual Tyrannosaurus Could Have Used Like Half A Viagra

By Preston Garrett · July 12, 2010

As a wee lad, my grandfather had an incredible cool factor working for him – he let me see any movie I wanted, no matter how ludicrous or inappropriate.  A few that made the cut based on my affinity for provocative VHS boxes:

The Shining
Papillion
Scarface
Halloween
The Dirty Dozen
 
There's a standout though that I will forever hold dear – my seven-year-old eyes were amazed, obsessed, and totally reverent towards it… and lets just say this reverence is still very much alive in me.  The film was John McTiernan's Predator.
 
Predator took over my Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles infatuation overnight.  Yeah, it had come out about 5 years before I saw it, but it didn't matter.  I had the dialogue of the film memorized from cover to cover, my favorite line being, "This stuff will make you a goddamn sexual Tyrannosaurus."  Needless to say, I may have dropped this line in a very inopportune situation in front of my parents during a vast Thanksgiving meal, our Pastor in attendance, no less… when I was 8.
 
Yes, Predator is part of my fanboy makeup, along with most of my nerdball peers.  Predator 2 definitely isn't, and the AVP "franchise" is a total embarrassment to the Predator lore (to be completely honest with you, the idea of AVP was a fantasy of mine since I saw the Alien films when I was about 10 – the insane disappointment I felt when I saw the first film is one of the seminal film blunders in my opinion – it could have been fantastic.)
 
If you know me at all, you know that I think Sin City was one of the top 10 best films of the 2000s (first decade – list coming soon.)  So when I heard Robert Rodriguez would be producing what I thought was a reboot of the Predator franchise, I about soiled my pants with schoolgirlish excitement.  Especially after Planet Terror and the Machete trailer in all its exploitative greatness, I couldn't imagine what sort of treatment Rodriguez might have planned for my beloved Predator
 
So about a yearish later after I heard more about what Predators was actually going to be – (more or less) a third installment to the original Predator franchise.  Not a reboot or any of that new school film nonsense that's plaguing the cineplex today.  Rather, a 15+ year in the making revisit to the film I held so dear to me at the tender age of seven.
 
Enough futzing around.  Yes, I indeed saw Predators this weekend…
 
As I've made totally obvious, my expectations were at the steepest precipice of "high" going into the movie.  So it's no surprise that I left somewhat disappointed.  To get it out of the way, I give Predators about a 3-star rating (out of 4), but note that I feel like I'm being a little generous with this amount of praise.  But I'm a sucker for those damn ugly motherfuckers…
 
The basics: a bunch of hardass mercenary types are dropped onto what they find out is a mysterious planet that doubles as a game preserve.  Yes, they're the game.  And yes, the Predators are indeed the hunters of said game. Chaos, skinning, thermal vision, and creative profanity ensue.  At first, of course, all these hard asses want to kill one another, but Royce (Adrien Brody) quickly tells them what idiots they are, and the band of thugs quickly join forces to fight for their survival.
 
It's pretty pointless going into finer details of the plot.  There are definitely logic holes gaping around every corner, namely who the fuck put these guys on this planet in the first place.  But the film is such a faithful testament to the drawn out, gradual build of suspense from the first film that you can't help but bask in the reworked Alan Silvestri score every second of the film.  In the same vein of Rodriguez's more exploitative fare, the plot holes are more endearing than anything else.  
 
Under Rodriguez's tutelage, director Nimrod Antal nails the tone of the first film… but doesn't really take it anywhere new.  I kept thirsting for some sort of twist that moved the suspense in a weirder direction, albeit there is a pretty fantastic (yet pretty predictable) twist by the end of the film that definitely moves away from the original's action/adventure format to a more psychological thriller sort of arena.  Again, it's not like earth shatteringly awesome, but for nerdballs like myself, it's just a shit ton of fun to see Predators on the screen in a world that's super loyal to the lore I grew up loving and reenacting with my friends in the backwoods of Tennessee (once we all saw Deliverance though there were no more such antics in the forests of Appalachia – whole other story.)
 
So my main beef with Predators is simply that it was an almost line for line copy of the original in a lot of ways.  Even though Schwarzenegger's kick ass rescue unit was comprised of "heroes" in the traditional sense, our anti hero mercenaries and convicts are essentially the same exact characters.  Brody is Dutch (and to his credit, he gives a lot more depth to the character than Schwarzenegger did), Fishburne is Bill Duke's character (the raving sadist), Walton Goggins is Shane Black's awkward weirdo provocative catchphrase character, Oleg Taktarov is a compassionate version of Jesse Ventura (mini gun in tow), and the list goes on.  The only "newbie" thrown into the archetype mix is Topher Grace's character… which is more fun just to watch unfold instead of shittily explain here.
 
On the whole, yeah, Predators is fun.  The performances are solid enough for the genre it is, and the action is… actiony.  If you're a diehard Predator fan like me, then it's worth seeing in the theater with perhaps a slight inebriation of some sort.  If you're on the fence, it's definitely worth a Netflix or Red Box, especially if you have a huge TV.  But other than that… I wasn't really left feeling like the sexual Tyrannosaurus I thought I'd be.  And that, my friends, about sums up my entire life up to this point.
 
Thus, Predators is a metaphor for my sexual id.  View at your own risk.