Predators Review

20th Century Fox really have the bargain basement blockbuster honed to a fine art. This Summer however they’re struggling to turn a decent profit with The A Team and in particularly Knight And Day underperforming at the US Box Office. With Predators, they have a July release with an apparent budget of $40 million. With the average cost of a Summer movie these days being $200 million (that’s just production costs, it doesn’t include marketing and distribution) $40 million is a bargain, right? I am no advocate of the idea that with large amounts of money automatically comes interesting results. Most of the mega-budget movies are pretty terrible these days if you ask me. But what’s happening currently at Fox seems to be a lack of ambition that is typified in the small scale nature of projects released in a large scale season. Enter Predators.

Predators is that kind of film where you walk out and say, “Well it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be” and this seems to be where Fox is happy to pitch their films. Predators isn’t as bad as you’d think it would be but that doesn’t mean it’s good. It doesn’t even make it okay. I sat there throughout its running time, not angry, not irritated but not excited or even interested either. Predators is basically a retread of the original except that instead of being on Earth, the jungle is on the Predator’s home planet, the group of walking corpses isn’t a coherent unit as it was in the first film but is instead a rag-tag group of the world’s best killers (or “predators” if you will) from a range of backgrounds and countries and… Nope, I think that’s it for differences. Oh, the CGI predator dogs… Which are excellent. Really, really excellent.

Boxes are ticked, enormous weapons fired and spines are torn from bodies. Adrien Brody lowers his voice and makes it husky to let us know he’s a credible action star and Laurence Fishburne turns up as a kind of Colonel Kurtz meets Ogilvy from War of the Worlds which is one of the more fun things in the film. Many of the effects are done practically which is admittedly refreshing, the Predators still feeling like guys in suits which is by no means a criticism. The film is presumably a low budget attempt to resuscitate a franchise that basically flatlined after the first film, a kind of Predators Begins. But what it lacks in budget it really needs to make up for in story, imagination and inventive action scenes. There is nothing remotely fresh, original or even interesting in most of Predators. It’s just…there. Inoffensively there.

Enough messing around 2010. It’s time for Inception. Don’t let me down!

5/10