"Predators": Partly Reviewed With Partial Spoilers

It's commonly the case that I watch a movie and see nothing but the fundamental problems that, if addressed, would have made the movie good or better. This is all just my opinion, naturally, and I can certainly be wrong. As capable as I am of admitting fallibility, I am none too capable of keeping my opinions to myself, and so I feel I must address the shortcomings which I saw in the 2010 film "Predators".

There are really only two severe problems I had with the movie, so this shouldn't take so very long. The first thing I felt was annoyance with the initial premise. In the film, a gaggle of soldiers, mercenaries and such are kidnapped and airdropped into a place where the predator aliens hunt them. It feels like an old, hoary freshman film student's idea to have a bunch of strangers wake up together with no idea of where they are, or what's going on.

I would just as soon cut through the confusion by having people know what's going on instead of muddling along and trying to figure out what we the audience knew before we stepped into the theater (or sat down in front of the TV). That's always a tough balancing act, trying to get enough in front of the audience that they're not impatient, but not so far that they are confused. In the case of "Predators", I felt rather like Cassandra, blessed with foreknowledge but cursed with an inability to help.

My second and even larger problem has to do with the ensemble of characters who we follow through the movie. They are, as I said, a bunch of real hard cases. Among them are death squad members, drug cartel enforcers, condemned rapists and more. What frustrated me was that we mainly know these are really tough, really bad guys because they say that's what they are. They tell us what their horrible origins are and agree among themselves that they are bad guys, but they mostly spend their time productively trying to work out a solution to the problem at hand for everyone.

A note that I hear sometimes in improv comedy is to not say what I am, but to be what I am. They say they are bad, but they seldom do anything really bad except wrestle each other. I mean, when a guy is a violent death row inmate, do you figure him to placidly fit into a team? That's what he and the rest do, with no more bad behavior than your average action film needs to proceed to a reasonable conclusion. That frustrated me.

Those two things aside, the film worked all right for me. I could have done without the sudden, bewildering appearance of Lawrence Fishburne, but the movie mainly works pretty decently. With some muscle on him, Adrien Brody is a pretty persuasive action hero (as I guessed from 'King Kong'), and the film delivers reasonably well on what it promises, which is something that people have not had any reason to expect from a "Predator" film in over twenty five years.