Review by Ryan Casey

I won’t lie, I never really held much hope that the skillfully titled Predators would be comparable to the timeless original which is one of my favourite films. However Simon’s persistent optimism, “Nah Ryan, come on, we gotta go and see it, you never know... Predators... yeh?” ultimately convinced me to go. 

PLOT SYNOPSIS
The film starts with Adrien Brody falling through the sky. He lands in a jungle and gradually encounters a mixture of ethnic stereotypes: Yakuza, Soviet Militant, Mexican gunslinger, a rapist doctor? (Yeah that last one got me too). Normally this cliche' cast would lose my interest entirely, but knowing the fact they will all at some point very soon be hunted and brutally murdered by Predators kept me watching. However, despite the main characters being transported to an alien hunting planet and the Predators releasing (for lack of a better description) Predator hunting hounds, all the death scenes are boring and predictable.

They all start getting killed off one by one, until they meet Lawrence Fishburne. He aids the collection of misfits for all of five minutes, before turning out to be mentally insane and then tries to kill them all. Adrien Brody then decides that a younger Predator that's been outcasted by the better hunters will somehow help them to escape the planet if they release him from his chains. That old honourable Predators will help their favourite sport routine!

By the time it gets to the end climax you just want every human in this film to die. However, it wouldn't be 'Predator' without at least one survivor and so Adrien Brody with his ripped spartan body (no comparison to Arnie) and his new Predator friend find themselves in a battle with the lead Predator. There's some pathetic subplot in which the doctor played by Topher Grace tries to rape the female love interest because he's as the trailer suggests one of the "most dangerous killers on the planet." Although I fail to see how a sex offender registers as good sport?

I will now take this opportunity to list just a few things about ‘Predators’ I really didn’t like.

One of the key aspects of the film I was really interested in was the inclusion of Predator dogs. I’ll admit to being slightly excited as the on screen tension mounted before their arrival. The foolish hope that they might actually look cool was squashed like a fresh turd underfoot, as what I was presented with can only be described as a space pig with tusks coming out of its arse!

Moving onto the Predators themselves. I was looking forward to seeing a couple of fresh Predator designs. What I did get was a Predator with a mask that made it look like Sauron from Lord of the Rings, and another with a shitty skeleton jaw line attachment making him look like some camp villian of He-Man’s. Also I don’t like the frankly awful CGI’d thermal vision that is clearly just randomly coloured in post-production with no thought to how it represents temperature. If that wasn’t bad enough keep an eye out for the Predator’s new heartbeat sound vision. That’s right Predators can now see sound! WTF?

Now, this is just my personal opinion but Adrien Brody does not cut it as a hard, no nonsense action hero. Yes I realised beforehand that he wasn’t going to be a patch on Arnie, but every time he came on screen and started talking macho nonsense in his 'The Dark Knight' wanna be, unconvincing husky voice, I found myself thinking “Shut up! You bent nosed berk!”

Predators is just a rip off of the original. it’s criminal. It literally just steals scenes from it. The most annoying of which is when the Samurai Yakuza character, stops fleeing the Predator and decides to meet it head on in combat just like 'Billy' did in the original. At this point me and Simon turned to each other in disbelief, Simon’s optimism finally extinguished as he declared confidently, “This… Is… So… Shite!” I nodded my approval to this comment and considered walking out of the cinema.

The final line of the film annoyed me immensely, as Brody declares after the only means of him escaping the planet has been destroyed, “Now let's get off this fucking planet!” How? Laurie Jago summed it up perfectly when the conversation naturally took a turn towards comparing Predators with AVP. Which one is better?

Laurie Jago – “Well it’s like asking what’s better, shit or diarrhoea?”

RATING

Don't waste your time with this. Just watch the original and you'll enjoy yourself a lot more! I give this 1star out of 5.