PREDATOR: El Diablo Que Hace Trofeos de Los Hombres

Predator (1987) – Directed by John McTiernan – Starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Carl Weathers, Elpidia Carrillo, Richard Chaves, Sonny Landham, Shane Black, Bill Duke, Jesse Ventura, Kevin Peter Hall, and Peter Cullen.

I really wanted to call this review Dillon and the Alien Hunting Machine. or Dillon and the Bungle in the Jungle.

PREDATOR is my favorite Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, and not because it stars two future governors, a former porn star, Apollo Creed, Harry (from Harry and the Hendersons), the guy who directed Sister Act 2, the guy currently directing Iron Man 3, and Optimus Prime.

No, PREDATOR is my favorite Schwarzenegger film because it sits in the perfect place between Schwarzenegger the actor and Schwarzenegger the star, and the film is the perfect mix of story and action. He’s still learning how to act here, not in a place where he thinks he knows what he’s doing, and the film neither relies too much on him nor caters to him. Director John McTiernan does an excellent job using Schwarzenegger in this film, pairing him with other serious dudes. These are big guys in the film and Schwarzenegger ends up looking better because he’s one of the guys and not THE guy.

When you take serious guys and put them on a serious mission, it makes the threat all the more effective. There is a bit of over-exaggerated fear in them when they begin to realize they’re up against something even more serious than them, but it doesn’t detract too much from the film.

PREDATOR is really an excellent example of minimalist storytelling. Dutch (Schwarzenegger) and his team of commandos are tricked by Dillon (Carl Weathers) into going on what they think is a rescue mission. When they get behind enemy lines and hit the compound where the hostages are allegedly being held, they realize Dillon lied to them. And then the rest of the movie is them fighting the Predator, who they can’t see, can’t understand, and can’t kill until after he’s taken all of them out but Dutch.

Smartly divided into three acts, PREDATOR concisely walks us through the raid, the group being taken out by the Predator, and finally the Arnold vs. Predator showdown. McTiernan smartly uses the heat and claustrophobic nature of the jungle to raise tension and even though none of these characters beyond Dutch and Dillon have a lot to do, PREDATOR does a fantastic job making me feel like Dutch’s crew has been working together for years.

And yes, there’s a bit of Skittles casting here: we’ve got the Euro, the black guy, the white guy, the American Indian, the Chicano, and the dorky white guy, but I never feel like this crew was put together by central casting.

One of the ways McTiernan accomplishes this is is by focusing on paired relationships. There’s not a lot of time for character development here, of course, but what little time there is, McTiernan uses it very effectively. Rick (Shane Black) tells Billy (Sonny Landham) a few p*ssy jokes, Mac and Blain (Bill Duke and Jesse Ventura) served together prior to joining Dutch’s group, and Dutch and Dillon have a history. In the director’s commentary, McTiernan mentions how he really wanted to cast Weathers opposite Schwarzenegger because Weathers could stand toe-to-toe with Arnold. You don’t hear a lot of people giving Weathers credit for his acting chops, but McTiernan heaps a lot of praise on him for his professionalism and notes how the pivotal scene between Dillon and Dutch where Dutch realizes he’s been played works primarily because Weathers carries the scene. The director also gives Arnold plenty of praise for how attentive he was at watching Weathers work.

I enjoy details like that in director commentaries because it shows how much an industry guy like McTiernan appreciates what Weathers can do for a film, and how much a still-relatively-new-to-acting Schwarzenegger appreciates what Weathers can teach him.

Another reason why PREDATOR is my favorite Schwarzenegger film is that the one-liners are delivered with sufficient pathos in order to highlight the grimness of the situation, not to afford the audience a chance to laugh in their popcorn. When Blain is told he’s been hit and grunts back, “I ain’t got time to bleed,” the effect is to let you know that he’s a tough guy in an incredibly tough spot. When Dutch is told the Predator has bled after one encounter, he remarks, “If it bleeds we can kill it,” signifying a ray of hope for the group. And when Dutch finally sees the Predator’s true face and remarks, “You’re one ugly motherf*cker” it’s a sign that the true horror of what he’s been facing is finally driven home.

I can’t leave out Elpidia Carrillo’s Anna, either, as she plays scared just about as well as anyone. She’s a constant reminder, amid all the machismo, that Dutch’s crew really has no idea what they’re up against. It’s fitting that she’s the one person who survives who isn’t played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, as the film rewards her proper fear and respect for the Predator (and the sacrifice of Dutch’s men) by allowing her to keep her life.

When Dutch finally asks her to tell him what she knows, she calls the Predator, “el diablo que hace trofeos de los hombres,” which she translates for us as “the demon which makes trophies of man.” As the Predator series developed, the character became characters and they lost both the mystery and the power of their initial appearance. If for some reason you only know the Predator from its more heroic appearances in the Alien vs. Predator films, do yourself a favor and hunt (Shalit!) PREDATOR down – it’s the best film of Arnold’s career and one the best action movies we have.

THE EXPENDABLES 2: Track Him, Find Him, Kill Him

The Expendables 2 (2012) – Directed by Simon West – Starring Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Yu Nan, Chuck Norris, Terry Crews, Randy Couture, Liam Hemsworth, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Scott Adkins, and Charisma Carpenter.

If you’re new to the Anxiety, be aware that SPOILERS LIE AHEAD. This is NOT one of those reviews that talks about the movie without talking about the movie. This is not a huge issue with a movie like EXPENDABLES 2, but I don’t want anyone to read ahead under false pretenses. So, one last time, there are SPOILERS ahead of you if you keep reading.

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THE EXPENDABLES 2 is the perfect dessert for a summer that offered a lot of high-quality films (The Hunger Games, The Avengers, Amazing Spider-Man, Dark Knight Rises, Prometheus), but also a relatively staggering amount of movies that, irrespective of how well they were made, were not designed get you laughing (Hunger Games, Dark Knight Rises, Prometheus, The Raven, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, Snow White & The Huntsman, Total Recall). There were movies that tried to offer a good time, but those films were largely mediocre to awful (Dark Shadows, Men in Black 3, Battleship, The Watch, and the good but disappointing Brave). I wish I’d made it to the theater to see Ted, because that seems to have been the one comedy released this summer that really delivered the funny.

If you’ve seen the trailers for EXPENDABLES 2, you know the film promises to deliver explosions and laughs, and that’s exactly what EX2 delivers.

Part nostalgia, part pure action, Sylvester Stallone’s all-star ode to the way he used to be is big, loud, and wonderfully ridiculous. Unquestionably, a big part of the fun here is watching all of the action all-stars sharing the screen, and if I had one small complaint with EX2, it’s that returning characters Yin Yang, Gunner, Hale Caesar, and Toll Road (Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Terry Crews, and Randy Couture) are minimized to a degree to make way for new arrivals Booker, Maggie, and Billy the Kid (Chuck Norris, Yu Nan, and Liam Hemsworth), and returning Hall of Famers Church and Trench (Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger).

Don’t get me wrong – it’s great to see Norris, Willis, and Arnold banging around in this movie, and both Yu Nan’s Maggie and Liam Hemsworth’s Billy the Kid provide some some of the film’s stronger narrative elements, but their inclusion is obviously going to come at someone’s expense, and that person is not going to be Sylvester Stallone (nor should it). It’s disappointing that Jet Li is only around for the opening action sequence, that Crews and Couture aren’t given more to do (Couture was one of the best parts of the first EXPENDABLES movie), and that even Jason Statham’s role feels diminished this time around.

After Barney Ross and Lee Christmas (Stallone and Statham) beat up some bad guys, Barney sends Lee back to get their weapons. I’m sitting in the theater and thinking, “Why are there so many burned kernels in this tub of popcorn? And why is one of the two main stars in the movie being sent on an errand?” Lee even makes this same point (about the errand, not the corn), when he tells Barney to get someone else to do it. But Barney doesn’t, and so Lee goes off for a solo run. Immediately, I was scolding myself for questioning what was happening because clearly Lee was going to be in for some solo ass-kicking. Maybe he’d be on the receiving end, maybe he’d be on the giving end, but what wasn’t going to happen was Lee would drop out of the narrative.

Yet, that’s what happens. He goes off to get the equipment. He complains on the radio to Barney. He drives back. He’s late for a fight where the team gets saved by the surprise arrival of Booker. Someone cracks a joke about “Christmas being late this year.”

EXPENDABLES 2 is a bit of a different beast than the first EXPENDABLES movie. The first film felt like a declaration by Stallone that could still make a kick-ass action film with the best of them. And he could. To achieve this, Stallone wrapped himself in the context of younger, faster, stronger men. Sure, Willis and Arnold were around for a cameo, and yeah, there was Dolph Lundgren still kicking around in his company, but Statham and Li were guys with active action-film careers, and Crews and Couture were noticeably younger and bigger.

In contrast to the first movie, EX2 is a victory lap, and it’s a well-earned lap for Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Willis, Norris, and Jean-Claude Van Damme, who plays a villain named, er, Vilain.

The result of this celebration of themselves is a more humorous film, and while EXPENDABLES 2 isn’t, on the whole, a better overall movie than EXPENDABLES, it is a more enjoyable movie. I’ll watch the first film when I want to watch a purer action movie, but the second film when I want something a bit lighter. They’re both very good movies, though, and much like EXPENDABLES had me hoping for EXPENDABLES 2, EX2 already has me wishing for EXPENDABLES 3 to get here.

I say “lighter” like this is a pure comedy and that’s not the case. In fact, now that Stallone has handed the directing reigns over to Simon West, the action sequences are a notch better, too. EX2 just hums from start to finish. It opens with a fantastic rescue mission that sees the team rescuing not only a Chinese businessman, but Trench, too. It’s a big sequence, longer than, say, a typical James Bond opening, and West makes us feel every punch, every kick, every gunshot, every slice of the knife. There’s all manner of trucks and copters and smashing and explosions, and it sets a powerful tone.

Then Jet Li exits after one last good line. Yin Yang is jumping from the Expendables’ plane with the rescued businessman and says that maybe he’ll be back and maybe he won’t. Gunner says, “If you don’t come back, who am I going to pick on?”

“I’m sure you’ll find another minority,” Yin shoots back.

There’s a victory party at the local bar back in the States, but Barney takes off early after having a chat with Billy. The youngster wants to get out of this business and go settle down with his girlfriend but he also wants to stick through to the end of the month. In other words, you pretty much know he’s going to die. And he does. Church gets Barney and Co. to take a new assignment to even up the score after Barney’s actions at the end of the first mission. Barney makes the crew take a woman along with them because Maggie is an expert at getting into the safe they need to crack. They get the device Church wants, but then Vilain, his sidekick Hector (Scott Adkins), and their terrorist group, the Sang get the drop on Billy and force Barney to give the device over to them.

Van Damme is top notch in the film as the cool, confident bad guy. He kills Billy by having Hector hold a knife before the kid’s heart and then kicking it through his chest and into his heart. It’s a pretty bad-ass move, and nearly everything JCVD does in this film is bad ass. He’s the perfect bad guy for a film like this, and his final one-on-one fight with Stallone is a darn good one.

There’s a plot here about JCVD stealing some abandoned Russian plutonium but it’s just the vehicle to get to all the action and laughs.

When the group is pinned down in an abandoned Soviet training facility that looks more like an abandoned back lot of a Hollywood studio, a mysterious hail of bullets comes in to kill all the Sang and save the day. Who could this mysterious savior be?

None other than Chuck Norris. The movie has a lot of fun with in-jokes and none more than with Norris. His character’s name is Booker, which is the same name of the character Norris played in Good Guys Wear Black. Stallone refers to him as a “lone wolf,” which is the title of the Norris flick, Lone Wolf McQuade. They even work in one of those Chuck Norris tough guy jokes when Booker says that he was once bit by a poisonous snake, but after five days of holding on, the snake died.

Almost as if he was taking this as a challenge, Arnold reminds everyone that he’s the King of One Liners, dropping an “I’ll be back” one time too many for Willis, who shoots back a “You’ve been back too many times already. It’s my turn,” and when he runs off, Schwarzenegger says, “Yippy Ki Yay,” stealing one of Willis’ famous line. He even comments on all the dramatic reappearances after Norris saves him and Willis by asking, “Who’s next, Rambo?”

As I mentioned up above, EXPENDABLES 2 is the perfect dessert with which to end the summer. It’s a big, loud, explosive, fun movie. The Sang might even set a record for most henchmen killed in a film. It’s a victory lap film, and I enjoyed every second of it – even when Arnold would say something that caused me to roll my eyes, it made me smile, because I was giving him the same eye roll that I’ve been giving him his old career. One of the reasons why I can’t stand awards shows is what Billy Crystal said back when City Slickers was out. He said that Slickers was the kind of film that was never going to win an Academy Award but that he doubted people had more fun seeing any other film that year. That’s what EXPENDABLES 2 is to me – it’s not nearly the best film of the year, but there hasn’t been many films more enjoyable to watch.

Here’s hoping this film is successful enough for a third film; if it happens, the rumor mill is already in full force, with talks of Steven Seagal, Nicolas Cage, and John Travolta perhaps jumping on board. (I can’t see Eastwood doing it.) There’s even talk of a female EXPENDABLES, which Simon West tossing out names like Angelina Jolie and Cameron Diaz. I suppose that West’s dream list shows the difference between men and women in Hollywood – when the male EXPENDABLES was made, it was largely filled with either guys who’s glory days were behind them, or guys that had never had glory days. Statham and Li were still viable solo stars, but of action movies and not considered A-list talent. When it comes to the female version, however, here’s West tossing out two A-list stars to come in. When A-list men get together, they make Ocean’s 11, but the women are supposed to make a fun explosion fest? That said, I hope a female EXPENDABLES is made with the same mix of ex-A-listers and current genre stars. We’ve been playing the casting game a bit over at the Better in the Dark Facebook page, and the team I assembled was Gina Carano and Sigourney Weaver in the Statham/Stallone roles, and rounded out with Carla Gugino, Michelle Rodriguez, Lucy Liu, Rhona Mitra, Milla Jovovich, Jamie Chung, and the Babysitter Twins. Pam Grier could take on the Scwarzenegger/Willis role, and Uma Thurman and Eliza Dushku would make great bad guys.

Playing FEMALE EXPENDABLES is a fun game and it makes you realize just how many viable female action stars are out there. Certainly, there’s not as many, but there’s more than enough to make a darn fine film. Whether we get a female version or another male version, however, I just flat-out want more EXPENDABLES films in my life.

TOTAL RECALL: See You At the Party, Richter

Total Recall (1990) – Directed by Paul Verhoeven – Starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Rachel Ticotin, Sharon Stone, Michael Ironside and Ronny Cox.

“I just had a terrible thought. What if this is a dream?”

Don’t worry, Arny. One, it is a dream. Two, it doesn’t really matter because it’s a pretty good dream. Three, if it is a dream, you get to wake up and go home and have sex with one of the hottest versions of Sharon Stone committed to the screen. So go ahead and play some kissy face with the sleazy but demure Rachel Ticotin before the credits get done rolling.

TOTAL RECALL has one of the more clever excuses in hand if you want to complain about the plot holes or plot conveniences – it’s all a dream that’s manufactured to give Doug Quaid (Arnold Schwarzenegger) the biggest bang for his buck, so of course everything happens exactly when it needs to happen. The key, of course, is that in action movies almost everything almost always happens when it needs to happen, which can leave the audience unsure if what we’re watching is real or simulated. Cleverly, RECALL builds in a backdoor in that, if you want to believe this is really happening, the film offers the idea that Quaid’s reality was actually his dream. Both reality and fantasy thus justify the existence of the other – either Quaid was living a false life (in essence, dreaming while awake) during his marriage to Lori (Stone) and has now woken up, or he was awake and is now dreaming. In the middle sits Quaid’s interest in Mars and interest in Melina (Ticotin) – if Lori is really Quaid’s wife, then Melina is the girl he’s been fantasizing about brought into the dream Rekall (the company that makes the dreams) built, and if Lori is really the waking dream wife, then Quaid’s past with Melina is bleeding through into his reality. Likewise, either Quaid is really obsessed with Mars, or he’s programmed to get back to Mars to complete his mission.

RECALL works on two levels – it’s foundation is an action movie, and above that is all the sci-fi goodness questioning reality. The action is constant and drives the plot and during the non-shooting parts of the film is when the film gets to thinking about what’s real and what isn’t.

As the film opens, Quaid is obsessed with Mars to the point that he’s more interested in watching the news than he is in being ravaged by his hot, frizzy-haired
wife, Lori. He decides to go to Rekall and get a Mars vacation implanted into his head. When they start the procedure, things go wrong/”wrong,” and it turns out/”turns out” that his brain had already been implanted and blah blah blah fight fight kill kill all the way to Mars. (For what it’s worth, when Quaid gets injected with the implant in the side of his neck, you can see that it leaves a clear, dark mark, yet when he starts wigging out, it’s gone. It’s not enough to point to this alone and say, “A-ha! See, it’s all the Rekall dream!” but it is there. Or not there.)

Quaid escapes the facility and makes his way to Mars, hiding as an woman to get through security in the scene famous for Arnold pulling off that multi-leveled mask, and once there he makes contact with Melina, who wants nothing to do with him because she loved him and he betrayed her. As this is playing out, Cohaagen (Ronny Cox), the director of the Mars Colony, has sent his primary enforcer, Richter (Michael Ironside), to capture Quaid and bring him in. Cohaagen’s endgame is to get Quaid to lead him to Kuato, the psychic leader of the resistance that’s growing out of his brother’s stomach.

That was a fun sentence to write.

Michael Ironside is the best part of this whole movie; he’s got laser beam eyes the entire picture and even though Cohaagen wants Quaid captured, Richter is full on trying to kill him – perhaps because in this reality, Richter is married to Lori, who’s been playing house with Quaid to keep an eye on him. Eventually, Cohaagen tells Quaid that he’s really Houser and that this is all part of an elaborate ruse. Quaid never gives up on the idea that this is all really happening and that if he used to be Houser, well, he’s Quaid now and that’s where he plans on staying.

Schwarzenegger is the worst actor in the film among the principals but it works to the film’s advantage. All he has to do is run, shoot, fight, and drop the occasional one-liner (though RECALL blessedly keeps the quips to a minimum), like when he tells the dead Lori, “Consider that a divorce,” or when he taunts Richter after an elevator accident by yelling, “See you at the party, Richter!” It’s these moments where Schwarzenegger seems most alive, almost as if he got to these parts in the script and his brain went, “Yes! I understand this part!”

Twenty-two years out, TOTAL RECALL is a weird film to watch. It’s both incredibly dated because of it’s Ah-nuld center (and Sharon Stone’s hair), but it also holds up better than most Ah-nuld movies because Verhoeven minimizes his main’s star’s Ah-nuld-ness, while still delivering a rocking, straight-ahead action film. The supporting cast – Stone, Ironside, and Cox – is very strong and so is the story. I fully believe what we’re watching is a dream, but I think the film supports both versions to the point that the film’s ultimate message is the experience is what’s important, and not whether that experience actually, physically happened or happened inside your brain. The consequence of the experience being real or imagined might be different but the experience and the memories it leaves you with are both valuable. If Quaid wakes up in the Rekall facility and goes hope to frizzy-haired Sharon Stone, his obsession with Mars that was driving a wedge between them has likely been satiated. And if it hasn’t, it lets him know that there are deeper issues with his marriage that need to be addressed.

Whether we’re talking about TOTAL RECALL, The Usual Suspects, The Wizard of Oz … whatever movie contains a story that “doesn’t happen” inside the narrative that “does happen,” it’s still a story we get to experience. It’s fun to argue about whether the main narrative of TOTAL RECALL is Quaid’s actual experience or his Rekall experience, but either way, we get a pretty decent movie out of it.