Predators

20th Century Fox

Rating: 18A

107 minutes

There’s a built in audience for Predators, a rehash of the 1987 film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and its various spinoffs (Aliens vs. Predators, etc.). It’s the kind of movie most reviewers dislike and young males adore.

It starts well, if you can accept the premise, with nine people falling out of the sky and, if their parachutes open, landing in a mysterious jungle.

Adrien Brody plays one of them and is the only well known actor, except for a brief appearance by Laurence Fishburne. Alice Braga is the only woman, so you suspect she will be around for the final conflict.

Most of them are heavily armed, professional killers; a Yakuza gangster, an African warlord, etc. An unarmed Topher Grace plays a nerdy doctor. They don’t know each other or where they are but they band together and Brody soon figures out that they are there to be hunted by unseen monsters/aliens, whatever.

As expected, they are slowly, and usually bloodily and grotesquely, picked off by the aliens. They are vicious, nasty, bloodthirsty things, with cloaking devices and heat-sensing vision, able to tear out the spine of their next unfortunate victim.

As unpleasant as this sounds, and if you can stomach the gore, the film provides a lot of tension and excitement for the first hour or so. But the ending is a foregone conclusion and it goes on too long.

Kudos to Brody for playing a foul-mouthed, intelligent action hero so well.

Rating: two deer of five

Next Week on Video

Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan star in yet another, not very good, cop buddy movie, Cop Out.

Alf Cryderman is a Red Deer freelance writer and old movie buff.