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.

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.

ALIEN VS. PREDATOR: REQUIEM: Small Town America Kills Two Franchises at Once

Alien vs. Predator: Requiem (2007; Unrated Version) – Directed by the Brothers Strause – Starring Steven Pasquale, Reiko Aylesworth, John Ortiz, Kristen Hager, Gina Holden, Chelah Horsdal, Robert Joy, Johnny Lewis, and Sam Trammel.

No one forces me to watch dogcrap movies like ALIEN VS. PREDATOR: REQUIEM, of course, so I’m not looking for any sympathy when I say that watching this film was a complete waste of 100 minutes of my Spring Break. (When you’re a student on Spring Break, you go somewhere nice and get loaded; when you’re a teacher on Spring Break, you take an actual break.)

AVPR is slick and stupid and absolutely no fun to watch. It’s hard for me to imagine they could make an ALIEN movie or a PREDATOR movie, let alone an ALIEN VS. PREDATOR movie that would be such a chore to watch, but here it is, an amateurishly made dumpster fire that can’t even manage to make either aliens or Predators look cool, let alone tell anything close to an interesting story.

It’s a bit of a struggle to decide whether AVPR is more mind-numbingly stupid or mind-numbingly amateurish, but after giving that question 4.3 seconds thought, I’ve decided I don’t really care.

AVPR takes the ALIEN and PREDATOR franchises to small town America. Picking up right where ALIEN VS. PREDATOR left off, there’s an Alien/Predator hybrid on the loose in the Predators’ spaceship. There’s a fight, the ship crashes into a quiet little mountain town, and then hilarity ensues as the aliens start facehugging and chestbursting. A signal gets back to the Predators home world, where a Predator (lets call him Benny) who’s apparently got nothing better to do than sit on his couch and listen to the CB band decides this is a good opportunity to get in his space car and fly across the universe to clean up this mess.

So …

So Benny touches down and starts cleaning up the mess. He’s got this fancy blue liquid that dissolves everything it touches so no trace of the aliens or the Predators will be left behind. It’s a stealth mission then, right?

Well, no, because Benny blows the hell out of everything he comes across. When he’s eliminating the first human hosts (a father and son) in the woods, a police officer crosses his path, so Benny does what Benny has to do to make sure no trace of this mess is left behind: he kills the cop.

And then skins him and hangs him upside down in a tree.

The film gives half-baked attention to a host of human subplots, but they’re all pretty dumb and poorly executed. We’ve got Dallas (Steven Pasquale), an ex-convict who returns home just in time for the fun to start. He’s got a little brother Ricky (Johnny Lewis), who hates his life because he delivers pizzas and has the hots for rich girl Jesse (Kristen Hager), who orders pizza that he has to deliver. Because AVPR has the brains of a dumb teenage slasher flick, it’s fitting that it’s populated by high school kids who walked onto the AVP set from a dumb teenage slasher flick. Jesse is hot and dating a complete tool, who likes to smack Ricky around for daring to have the nerve to look at his hot girlfriend.

Of course, his hot girlfriend likes being looked at by Ricky, and Ricky likes looking at the hot girlfriend, and the jealous boyfriend likes beating up Ricky, so they should live happily in some kind of kinky threesome of sex and violence.

Whoah. Wait. I can’t believe I actually started writing about AVPR like it’s a real movie.

Three-quarters or more of this movie takes place in the dark, making far too much of this movie impossible to see. It’s not hard to figure out why the Brothers Strause have done this, of course – darkness saves cash – but a little bit of flickering lights and green-tinted night vision goes a long way. There’s whole sequences in the movie (like nearly everything that happens in the hospital) where the majority of the screen is black and we only see glimpses and flashes of anything.

The real shame here is that absolutely nothing feels unique or visionary. AVP suffered from some of this, too, but at least Paul W.S. Anderson can competently film a movie. AVPR just feels like a quick and dirty cash grab – like 20th Century Fox knew that dropping a little money into making the film would net a tidy profit so they went ahead and did it.

Unlike any of the previous movies, there’s no one to root for in AVPR. They introduce returning military soldier Kelly O’Brien (Reiko Aylesworth) and you’d think this would be the Sigourney Weaver/Sanaa Lathan role, but nope. She’s just another character in a movie with too many characters. It’s a bit interesting that two of the main leads – Dallas and Kelly – are returning home to Gunnison for this movie because even in this movie the filmmakers realize that most of the townspeople are too stupid to follow around for 90 minutes. That includes Sheriff Eddie Morales (John Ortiz), one of the most incompetent sheriffs you’ll find anywhere.

In fact, only two townsfolk even make it out of the movie alive – Dallas’ brother and Kelly’s daughter. The rest are either killed by the monsters or wiped out when the U.S. military wipes out the town by dropping a bomb on it.

Your tax dollars at work.

Slick and stupid, ALIEN VS. PREDATOR: REQUIEM would like to traffic in style over substance, but it can’t even do style all that well. What we’re left with is a film that basically takes the ALIEN and PREDATOR franchises and sticks them in a dumb slasher flick. It’s too bad – I like the franchises and I like lead actors Steven Pasquale (from Rescue Me) and Reiko Aylesworth (from 24), but this is a film that once watched, never need be seen again.

________________

ALIEN / PREDATOR Review Index

ALIEN: A Survivor, Unclouded by Conscience, Remorse, or Delusions of Morality
ALIENS: My Mommy Said There Were No Monsters. No Real Ones. But There Are.
ALIEN 3: A Bunch of Lifers Who Found God at the Ass-End of Space
ALIEN RESURRECTION: Must Be a Chick Thing
ALIEN VS. PREDATOR: I Think This is a Manhood Ritual
ALIEN VS. PRDATOR: REQUIEM: Small Town America Kills Two Franchises at Once