Cast: Alice Braga, Adrien Brody, Topher Grace
Director: Nimrod Antel
Grabbing your attention from its very opening scene -- in which Adrien Brody literally falls from the sky into a dense forest -- Predators hits the ground running.
The film's got a simple premise: a disparate group of tough-nut strangers find themselves marooned in a tropical jungle on a strange planet, being attacked by predatory aliens. Like the original film in the series, 1987's Predators that starred Arnold Schwarznegger, the monsters in this movie sense the presence of humans by their body heat.
This fifth installment in the franchise, however, features more than one species of beasts. In a terrific early sequence the group of humans is attacked by a pack of multiple-horned boar-like creatures that look like they could rip you into shreds on immediate contact. The chief monsters in Predators are dreadlocked lizard-like extraterrestrials that can vanish and appear at will, thus proving a formidable enemy to the ordinary but armed humans.
Brody stars as Royce, a military mercenary, and the first in this group to figure that they have been selected as game on a hunting preserve, and that the predators will prey on them one by one. Alice Braga is a sharpshooter with a conscience; Topher Grace plays a nerdy doctor. The rest of this group comprises a Mexican mafia thug, a Russian soldier, a Japanese warrior, a gloomy African, and a sleazy death-row inmate in orange overalls.
The film starts off promisingly enough, as the group slowly begins to understand what kind of trouble they're actually in. But it's all downhill from the point Laurence Fishburne shows up as an exasperated survivor who has managed to stay out of the way of these beasts long enough for him to lead this group into his secret hiding place.
The special effects are not too bad, but in the end Predators is reduced to a typical cat-and-mouse chase movie with preposterous action. And that's a pity, because it almost worked as a morality tale -- this group of humans who were predators on earth, now finding the tables turned on them.
Not a complete waste of time if you enjoy the sci-fi/thriller genre, I'm going with two out of five for Predators. Watch it if you have the stomach for excessive blood-spill.
Rating: 2 / 5
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