PREDATOR 2: No Stopping What Can’t Be Stopped, No Killing What Can’t Be Killed

Predator 2 (1990) – Directed by Stephen Hopkins – Starring Danny Glover, Gary Busey, Ruben Blades, María Conchita Alonso, Bill Paxton, Robert Davi, Kevin Peter Hall, and Adam Baldwin.

PREDATOR 2 may just well be the most poorly conceived and executed sequel of the last three decades.

The largest problem with the film is that it can’t commit to the idea that the Predator isn’t a villain, and it doesn’t have enough brains to artfully work at the theme of moral complexity. The result is that we get the Predator slaughtering drug pushers, yet being tracked by our hero cop, Danny Glover. Are we supposed to root against the Predator when he’s killing hardcore killers and drug lords, and hanging the upside down? Because I’m totally rooting for him through the first part of the movie. Even when his actions are re-contextualized as “evil,” when he kills Glover’s partner, Danny Archuleta (Ruben Blades), that’s not enough for me to root against him – Archuleta was trespassing on the Predator’s turf, after all.

When Lieutenant Mike Harrigan (Glover) goes all predator on the Predator (Kevin Peter Hall), and I’m conflicted. I like Harrigan, and I can understand his wanting revenge, but I like the Predator, too. (Even if in this movie he’s really more Punisher than Predator.) My emotional commitment is further conflicted by the presence of federal agent Peter Keyes (Gary Busey), who’s a typical federal agent douchebag. In the same scene, then, I’m rooting for the Predator to take out Busey as I’m conflicted over the Predator/Glover fight.

There’s a real solid pot of conflicted morality here, but the film is too stupid to do anything with it.

Taking the film series out of the jungle, PREDATOR 2 takes the alien hunter persona and drops him into future, borderline post-apocalyptic Los Angeles. I’m not really sure if PREDATOR 2 is more properly called the worst Predator movie or the worst Lethal Weapon movie, but it’s a film that just isn’t very good. It’s main problem is that it oversells it’s attitude – Harrigan is too much the hothead cop, the violence is too cartoonishly executed, and Detective Jerry Lambert (Bill Paxton) is, well, too much a Bill Paxton character from the ’80s.

Taking the Predator to the city isn’t, in and of itself, a bad idea, but it’s not executed very well, at all, as the filmmakers decide to push this film into the near future by setting it in 1997. They seem to want a war zone in Los Angeles so they can use a gang war as an excuse to have lots of minorities kill each other with lots of blood and bullets.

The opening sequence is simply preposterous. In the director commentary track on PREDATOR, John McTiernan talks about a scene in the jungle where Dutch’s group fires all of their ammo at where they think the Predator has gone. They decimate the forest, but don’t kill the Predator, and McTiernan relates that this scene was his way of silently protesting the fact that he’d been hired to make a film that revels in violence as pornography. The payoff for McTiernan is that all that gunfire kills nothing more than vegetation. It’s a wonderful nod to the shortcomings of guns, which is that you can’t kill what you can’t hit.

There’s none of that cleverness in PREDATOR 2, and the opening sequence of gang violence is a horrid welcome into this movie. It’s just a seemingly endless series of people firing semi-automatics just to show gunfire. After this, we’ve got to endure a whole bunch of formulaic “good cop who doesn’t play by the rules and thus gets called on the carpet” nonsense. In short order, we watch Ruben Blades and Bill Paxton get killed, and Maria Conchita Alonso get injured. Glover then runs into the feds, where Gary Busey gets killed.

Danny Glover gives the role everything he can and it’s everything the role asks for and more. Unfortunately, that’s not always a good thing as he (and the film) go overboard a few too many times.

PREDATOR 2 never creates a real threat for the Predator. Yeah, Harrigan kills him, but it’s an opportunistic kill instead of a battle of smarts and so it falls flat to me.

I do like what happens after the kill, when a group of Predators reveal themselves to Harrigan so they can take the body of their fallen comrade away. One of them tosses Harrigan an old 18th century firearm, which confirms for Harrigan (even though Gary Busey just told him this) that the Predators have been here before and will be here again.

It’ll just take a while for them to be back in their own movie.

TOUCH: First Thoughts on FOX’s Jack Bauer Redemption Play

Touch (2012) – Season 1, Episode 1: “Pilot” – Starring Kiefer Sutherland, David Mazouz, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Danny Glover, Roxana Brusso, and Karen David.

I suppose the proper thing would be to act like TOUCH exists in a vacuum and that this show has nothing whatsoever to do with 24 or Jack Bauer.

Doing so, however, makes TOUCH nothing more than a less masculine, more New Agey version of Early Edition.

The pilot episode of TOUCH is a bland bit of metaphysical nonsense in which Martin Bohm’s (Jack Bauer) son Jake doesn’t talk, but can predict the future. Which is awesome. Except that he can’t (or chooses not to) talk, and communicates with people by writing numbers and patterns in a completely sideways manner. For instance, he doesn’t tell social worker Clea Hopkins (Gugu Mbatha-Raw, who played Martha Jones’ older sister Tish on DOCTOR WHO) that her mom is about to call, nor does he write down her mother’s number with a pencil and paper. No, Jake uses pieces of popcorn to “spell” out the numbers; the key is that Jake doesn’t seem all that interested in whether you get his message or not – he simply feels compelled to get the numbers out.

His dad is clearly struggling to find a connection with his son, which is why that social worker is hanging around in the first place. Martin used to be a journalist and married, and then 9/11 happened and his wife died. Now, he’s jumping from one social services unapproved job to another. Currently, he’s a baggage handler at an airport who pays off lost and found to take cell phones home for Jake to take apart.

It’s a perfect anti-Jack Bauer set-up. Where Jack was a TV-friendly version of U.S. Agent (which is the dumbest superhero name ever, Martin Bohm keeps Jack’s passion but Lifetimes the rest of the character down, so what we’re left with is a man who’s still driven, but one whose life has sputtered post-9/11 instead of finding a purpose. Jack Bauer was usually the one guy who could best understand any situation and he had to struggle to get others to understand him; now that insight has been given to his son Jake. Where Jack did everything for his country, Martin does everything for his son. Where Jack was his own instrument of action, Martin is Jake’s instrument.

All of this comes off as a kind of Earth 2 take on Jack Bauer. I argued (right here, in one of the Anxiety’s first posts) that Jack Bauer should have died at the end of 24 because the character had finally gone too far to be redeemed, and it’s easy to see Martin Bohm as Kiefer Sutherland’s attempt to give Jack that redemption.

We enter Jake and Martin’s life during a period where Jake keeps tripping an alarm on a cell tower at exactly 3:18 every day, and Martin begins to think this is odd. In a large sense, Martin’s sudden interest is a contrivance of the plot (he makes his leaps of logic a bit too quickly), but the show needs these things to happen quickly so it can set up the weekly formula of Martin struggling to understand Jake’s cryptic messages.

When Clea Hopkins shows up to do her evaluation, she’s all hard and business-like, but then Jake does the popcorn/numbers thing and Clea is instantly converted to thinking that there’s more going on that she normally sees. The social worker angle is a great one, because it will allow Jake to either not live at home (thereby making Martin a more sympathetic single dad while also giving Jake a permanent babysitter so Martin can run around and try to figure out what Jake means when he writes “318″ in a journal 8,000 times) or, at the very least, to give Martin a sidekick.

With Jake off at social services, Martin spends time at work doing a Google search on Jake’s abilities and ends up knocking on Danny Glover’s door. Professor Arthur Teller lives in a modest house and espouses crazy theories about the interconnectedness of the universe and how Jake can see all of the connections that no one else can until the show needs to introduce an Evil Jake to show how an Evil Martin can manipulate his kid’s abilities to make money. For now, Jake’s numbers put Martin in contact with the last man to see his wife alive (Titus Welliver), a fireman who carried her part way down one of the Twin Towers and then convinced himself she was dead so he could get out alive.

There’s a whole subplot here about a woman in a call center who wants to be a singer and a British businessman who’s lost a cell phone that contains the only pictures of his dead daughter and a Middle Eastern kid who gets turned into a suicide bomber in exchange for his parents getting an oven and … yeah, I’m not sure what’s supposed to be so great about all this. The interconnected nature of life? Okay, sure, I dug Magnolia just fine, but is this subplot going to be a part of every episode? Is it going to be fun watching three people who have nothing to do with one another have something to do with one another? Or are we going to get these three people back?

I’m honestly not sure which angle I’d prefer; they seem likely perfectly nice people but are we really going to get the forced connections every week of a kid who needs an oven coming into possession of a phone belonging to a man who sells kitchen supplies? Is the call center worker going to be this agent of convergence?

I don’t know, and I doubt I’ll be sticking around to find out. TOUCH doesn’t look like a show that you need to follow every week, so instead of giving it 3 or 4 episodes to hook me, I’ll probably check back in with episode 5 or 6 and see if the show has found a rhythm I can appreciate.

The pilot episode of TOUCH just doesn’t do much for me; there were some nice bits (such as Jake hugging Martin or the British salesman seeing his daughters pictures projected onto large outdoor screens in the middle of a city) but TOUCH pushes the interconnected nature of humanity a bit too far. While I like the positive message it pushes – that humanity, despite its individual foibles, is willing to help strangers – I dislike the maudlin nature of everything, and Sutherland’s time worn “I’m frazzled, I run, I sweat, I yell when I don’t understand, I yell when you don’t understand” Bauer-esque act isn’t a trip I have much interest in taking again.

And hey, if you’re so inclined, follow along on Twitter.

SILVERADO: I Got There Just Short of Too Late

Silverado (1985) – Directed by Lawrence Kasdan – Starring Kevin Kline, Scott Glenn, Danny Glover, Kevin Costner, Brian Dennehy, Linda Hunt, Jeff Goldblum, Rosanna Arquette, John Cleese, Ray Baker, Lynn Whitfield, and Jeff Fahey.

Lawrence Kasdan’s SILVERADO is determined to be both a classic Western and a non-traditional Western. The film contains plenty of gun fights, scoundrels, anti-heroes, shifty locals, revenge, testosterone, big shots of open spaces, and clustered shots of a small town built in the mud and out of wood, but it also steadfastly refuses to give us a traditional tough guy and it refuses to have any of the violence lead to any actual consequence.

Kasdan’s script is a technically proficient work that’s probably not taught in too many film schools anymore, but should be because everything in SILVERADO is here for a reason, a pretty solid achievement for a film that clocks in at over 2 hours. Kasdan also masterfully “tricks” you into his script. In the opening half hour where he introduces the main characters, Kasdan imbues SILVERADO with a whimsical energy (at least, whimsical for a Western, at least.) Paden (Kevin Kline) has a relaxed approach to life; left for dead in the middle of the desert by scoundrels who took his horse and possessions, leaving him with only his one-piece red undergarments, Paden has simply decided to lay in the sun and wait for the end.

Emmett (Scott Glenn) is established in the film’s firs scene as the traditional Western bad-ass, killing a group of men who’ve come to kill him, but the competently shot action scene where Emmett stays inside his shack and kills people through the walls and ceiling can’t compete with the image of Paden lying peacefully in the sand, and then his first words to Emmett, hoarsely whispered from his prone position: “Pleased to meet you.” Kline is so good as Paden that I’m willing to forgive his role in the mostly dreadful Wild Wild West.

When Paden and Emmett had first come to Turley, Paden sees the man who stole his horse and he goes into the nearest store to buy a gun to get the horse back. He takes the nicest gun out of the case but the only money he has is the single coin piece Emmett gave him to help out with some clothes, so he ends up leaving the store with the crummiest gun in the case. He moves to the middle of the street, still wearing only those red overall undies, putting bullets in the creaky gun as the horse thief rides down on him, shooting at Paden without success. One of the bullets goes through the undies right at the crotch, the thermals hanging low enough to not damage anything hanging. Paden finally gets his bullet in and shoots the man dead.

After Paden kills the guy, the scene cuts to him getting happily licked in the face by his horse. The army officer investigating the incident asks Paden why he should take his word that the horse is Paden’s.

“Can’t you see this horse loves?” Paden asks.

“I had a woman do that to me once,” the officer replies back, “but that didn’t make her my wife.”

The scene wonderfully blends violence with humor, presenting scene as amusing as it is violent, which seems to portend that SILVERADO is going to be more pleasant than anything else, with a West that’s clearly created for a Hollywood production.

This scene also introduces one of the film’s antagonists in Cobb (Brian Dennehy), a rough older guy in whose gang Paden used to ride. Dennehy gives the best performance in a film full of great performances; every scene he’s in he owns and the back-and-forth between him and Kline is a pure treat to watch, Cobb’s grinning wickedness perfectly countering with Paden’s outer calm.

Kline plays Paden as a perfectly affable guy, but though the exterior is cool, he’s wary of his insides burning too bright. He has a code, but it’s not the traditional tough guy code you might expect to find in a Western. Instead, when Emmett and Paden ride into the town of Turley, finding Emmett’s manchild-like brother Jake (Kevin Costner) arrested for murder and set to hang. Emmett tells Paden he’s going to break Jake out of jail and Paden tells Emmett somberly that he’s going to have to deal himself out. He doesn’t get too deep into why, but he Paden and Emmett head into a saloon, Paden sees the guy who stole his hat, and another thief gets gunned down by the calm Paden.

With Paden now in jail alongside Jake, he decides to help him escape.

Funny the things jail can do to a man.

Turley also contains another of Kasdan’s “tricks” into getting you to think SILVERADO is just going to be an enjoyable Western – John Cleese is the sheriff. Now, Cleese doesn’t do anything silly. In fact, he’s downright no nonsense. Paden and Emmett are having lunch at a saloon when Mal (Danny Glover) comes in and asks for a drink. This becomes a big deal because Danny Glover is black, which means Mal is black, which means there’s plenty of white folk that don’t take too kindly to his kind being around. The saloon keeper wants him gone, some local cowboys try to rough him up. Paden and Emmett just sit there and watch – it’s not their fight. That’s not to say they’re not moved by what’s going on, as Paden mentions to Emmett (apparently lost in his dinner plate but actually completely aware of what’s going on around him) that the situation seems downright unfair. Emmett wants to know, “Unfair to who?”

Showing that a dude on the frontier is a cool guy because he’s nice to a non-white is a a trope as old as white people have been on the American frontier, of course, and Paden and Emmett prove their progressiveness by taking Mal’s side (the truthful side) when Sheriff John Cleese shows up to figure out what’s what. Sheriff Langston lets Mal go but tells him to get out of town, then sits down at Emmett and Paden’s table, helps himself to some of their bread, and proceeds to interrogate them as to why they’re in town. “Just meeting a guy,” Emmett tells him, and describes his brother.

“I know where he is,” Langston tells him, and then we’re off to the jail.

Jake and Paden escape with some help from Emmett and the threw cowboys ride hard out of town, Langston and his posse hard on their trail. When the posse closes in, a gunshot is heard and bullets start hitting things near Langston. One of the deputies tells the sheriff they’re lucky this shooter is such a bad shot, but Langston calls him an idiot and says, “He’s hit everything he’s aimed at.” The shooter is Mal, paying Paden and Emmett back, and when he knocks Langston’s hat off his head, the sheriff remarks that, “Today, my jurisdiction ends right here.”

That moment is the demarcation point in the movie. Having suitably introduced his four heroes, and created a bond between them, Kasdan’s picture turns much more serious. SILVERADO doesn’t get glumly serious like Kasdan’s later Western, Wyatt Earp (which seems determined to have absolutely no fun), but the men ride to Silverado (helping a caravan along the way, in part so Paden can hit on Rosanna Arquette) and settle into their lives.

For Mal, it’s a visit to his parent’s homestead, where he finds the main building nearly burned to the ground and hordes of cattle grazing on the land. His parents are nowhere in sight, but later that night his father returns and tells him he’s being run off the land by the cattle rancher Ethan McKendrick (Ray Baker). After Mal scares off two of McKendrick’s thugs, they return the next day with more men and kill Mal’s dad.

For Emmett and Jake, it’s reconnecting with their sister’s family, but there’s pre-existing bad blood with McKendrick. Emmett went to jail for killing McKendrick’s father in self-defense years earlier, and while McKendrick says that’s in the past, he wouldn’t make a very good antagonist if that were true. McKendrick sends his men after Emmett and Jake, kidnapping their nephew in the process. Emmett only survives the ambush thanks to the intervention of Mal. The travelling companions have now been joined as allies against McKendrick. With Emmett to hurt to travel, Mal goes to town for him, but he’s betrayed by “Slick” Stanhope (Jeff Goldblum), a gambler who’s involved with Mal’s sister (Lynn Whitfield), and Cobb’s men get the jump on him.

Cobb is the would-be bigshot of Silverado, as he’s both the sheriff of the town and the owner of the main saloon. He hires Paden to help run the place, and uses Paden’s affection for Stella (Linda Hunt), the other co-manager of the place to keep Paden out of the conflict that’s coming between McKendrick and Emmett, Jake, and Mal. Paden agrees, but Stella won’t have it, and Paden asserts himself back into the fray.

What follows is a raid by Mal, Paden, and Emmett (Jake has been kidnapped by the McKendricks) on the McKendrick compound, and then a big gunfight in town that sees the four men emerge victorious and virtually unscathed. The film’s final action piece sees a showdown between Paden and Cobb that ends with Paden victorious.

If there’s a complaint about SILVERADO it’s this final sequence that sees all the good guys end up happy and alive, but then you realize that despite the serious themes since our protagonists left Turley, SILVERADO was never really meant to be a realistic Western as much as it’s meant to be a new kind of Hollywood Western, built on the classic model but infused with contemporary sensibilities. Westerns were out of style when Kasdan made SILVERADO, and so it’s a wise decision to play it relatively safe and give people a happy ending. That’s not to say SILVERADO is simplistic, because it’s not. Kasdan gives you plenty of stuff to chew on – far, far too much to get into here, but know this if you haven’t seen the movie – SILVERADO is a professional movie made by smart people and starring fantastic actors. Brian Dennehy gives the performance of his career, Kevin Kline gives one of his best, and the rest of the all-star cast is right there with him.

SILVERADO is one of those films that always seems to get overlooked or fails to get mentioned alongside the great Westerns, and while I certainly wouldn’t put it in the rarefied air category of Once Upon a Time in the West and Unforgiven, I wouldn’t put it all that far behind them, either. SILVERADO is an immensely satisfying and enjoyable film.