Night of the Hunter: PREDATORS

With Predators, director Nimrod Antal continues his streak of consummate B-movie craftsmanship, following the better-than-you’d-expect Armored, by making his creature feature chill and thrill with efficient, streamlined artistry. Of course, his film is no less silly at its core than its Predator predecessors, but it still manages to work, on average, better. It’s certainly not Antal’s fault that the film ends up not that great. It runs out of stream just when it should be ramping up, but for the majority of its runtime, Predators is just diverting enough.

The film transposes the original’s earthbound alien hunter concept into a more otherworldly setting. It opens with Adrien Brody, as an ex-military mercenary, waking up while plummeting from the sky, wearing a parachute that automatically opens. When he lands, he finds himself joined by other tough figures from around the world. There’s the grizzled Danny Trejo, the tough Alice Braga, the overwhelmed Topher Grace, the slimy Walton Goggins, the gruff Oleg Taktarov,the stoic Louis Ozawa Changchien, and the strong Mahershalalhashbaz Ali. They’re all deadly – well, except for Grace – and they’re all very angry. It soon becomes clear that they’ve been kidnapped and dropped onto an alien planet to be hunted by the Predators. Why does it become clear? Because Adrien Brody’s a really, really good guesser.

For most of the film, the characters dodge traps, shoot at aliens and try to survive. Antal deploys the special effects with a surprising visceral force. The mix of practical and digital effects is very convincing; the images have a heft and danger that is hard to achieve in this age of cheap, easy CGI. When the actors tumble down a hill, avoid falling spikes, or splash over a waterfall, it looks and feels like real people performing physical stunts. This extra spike of old-school danger is enhanced by Antal’s great eye for compositions and ability to hold a shot for longer than modern schlock usually allows.

And the movie’s certainly schlock. The Predator series strikes me as having one of the most limiting concepts of any franchise. I mean, once you’ve seen one ugly alien hunter stalking a group of people, you’ve seen them all. But, it’s to Antal’s credit, and to the credit of screenwriters Alex Litvak and Michael Finch, working from a concept by producer Robert Rodriguez, that this picture moves and thrills as much as it does. It’s convincingly exciting and scary, moving with a slimy speed that zips things along. The movie really works, bringing the low-rent summer fun in mildly satisfying, if often unsurprising, ways.

Quick Look: Armored (2009)

Armored flew under the radar last December, quickly and unsurprisingly pushed there by the annual collection of high-profile holiday releases, which is unfortunate since it’s well worth discovering. It’s essentially a heist movie, following a team of armored truck drivers who plan to fake a hijacking and robbery, hide the money, and then double back later to pick it up and share the wealth. These are blue-collar workers struggling to make ends meet, a demographic often not the center of a Hollywood production, even one as low-profile as this. It’s a great, macho ensemble, starting with our central character, played by Columbus Short. His character is a young bundle of anxiety due to the recent deaths of his parents leaving him with custody of his teenage brother. We follow him, learn to care about him, meet the rest of the ensemble through him. There’s Matt Dillon, Laurence Fishburne, Jean Reno, Skeet Ulrich, Amaury Noalsco, and Milo Ventimiglia. They’re all tough, all determined, and yet they have distinct personalities that develop and grow throughout the film. They’re defined as much, if not more, by what they do as what they say.  When the heist doesn’t go according to plan, it turns into a sort of morality play via a ticking-clock thriller. The bulk of the movie takes place in a grim abandoned factory, a setting of inherent danger enhanced by the men’s fear of being caught at any minute. Think of it as 12 Angry Men with the jurors’ lives at stake. The characters are well-drawn; the goals of the plot are clear with a plan that must be executed within certain time constraints. This is a tightly constructed, purely solid suspenseful movie, wasting almost no time at all before plunging the audience into well-staged and bluntly-effective sequences. Directed with considerable skill by Nimród Antal, from a tight script by James V. Simpson, this is a pleasingly slick, and wholly unpretentious, example of a modern day B-movie aesthetic, with perfectly grimy set design and exciting intensity in the performances. It’s nothing more and nothing less than a fun time at the movies.