Predators showed me that despite all other evidence to the contrary, I am in fact maturing. You'd think this would be obvious enough without the help of a cynical cash-in sequel/prequel, retread/reboot. I mean, I'm now 32 and a husband and father. But lately I'd been wondering if I was ever going to grow up. Stacks of comic books and video games are piled in my living room. I still treat the acquiring of a back issue or sophomore record with the same obsessive focus as I did with movie posters or laserdiscs in my youth. In many ways I'm still the kid who poured over the Consumers Digest toy catalogue, circling coveted items and making ordered lists of toys I hoped to one day possess. I look around at guys my age, friends and acquaintances, and I see pretty much the same thing. None of us really recovered from the pop culture that blew our pre-adolescent minds, and like addicts, we seem to be perpetually chasing the T-1000 (insert whatever nerdy pop culture reference applies to you).
I don't know if this is good or bad. No wait, I'm actually pretty sure it's bad.
When I saw the trailer for Predators, I received a glimmer of hope that maybe, just maybe I was going to become an adult after all. Why? Because I didn't give a fuck. At all. And while this may not be a shocking revelation for most, its a BIG DEAL for me. The original Predator with Arnold Schwarzenegger was one of those childhood obsessions I was talking about above. I was already mad about all things Arnold, so when Predator came out (Arnold vs. an alien!) and it was PG-14, meaning I could actually see it in the theatre, I was bouncing off the walls. Seeing it for the first time (the first of many) in a darkened theatre all the way back in 1987 is one of my fondest memories from my childhood. It was the Saturday that my public school was putting on the Summer Fair, a day of games, baked goods, prizes and the ever-popular "cherry picker" ride on a fire truck crane. The plan was to attend the fair and then hit an afternoon show. Naturally my best friend Andrew Palkovic and I came prepared. We spent the day at the school fair dressed in head-to-toe camouflage fatigues, our faces painted with the same commando black stripes that Arnold sports on the poster, and carrying our arsenal of plastic machine guns. The fair was fun and all, but we were counting the minutes until show time.
At the appointed time, Andrew and his mother, Betty and our other other friend, Andrew Mitchell took to the Canada Square theatre to line up for the afternoon show. The appearance of 3 public school commandos in full military fatigues, armed to the teeth and standing steely-eyed and stony (we were all three of us acting the part of Arnold) seemed to really entertain the adults waiting in line. They gave us "thumbs up" and tittered as we checked and re-checked that our plastic bullet magazines were full of invisible ammunition. Naturally Predator rocked our fucking world. Betty was a little concerned that for all my pre-show enthusiasm and Arnold fervor, I wasn't quite ready for PG-14 movies on the big-screen due to my curling up into her lap during the scene where Arnold and his team uncover the skinned and hanging bodies of a chopper crew. But I quickly bounced back from that momentary blip of genuine fear once the action-shit hit the action-fan and Arnold chased that "ugly motherfucker" alien straight into the jungles of my heart.
So if you can't already tell, Predator means a great deal to me. Predators was bio-engineered in a lab to exploit the Predator-y emotions of 80's action movie fans like me. It's a new, bad strain of an old drug mixed by retarded chemists who confused their compound volumes. It's a concoction that packs absolutely no punch for experienced users and has little hope of hooking in those that haven't already had their brains fried by the original. In fact, Predators is so bland and boring it causes the initiated to momentarily ponder what they ever found cool about the franchise's premise in the first place. The sum total of Predators innovation is to add the letter "s" to the title. That's right, while Predator managed to please with only one big game hunting extraterrestrial, Predators bores you to tears with scores of them.
From the opening frames, things don't look so dire though, in fact it shows promise. To say the film hits the ground running is almost entirely accurate, since every character falls out of the sky in the first 4 minutes, and after dusting themselves off, begin shooting at things and doing a fuckload of running. I don't think I've ever seen a movie just start like this before, fulfilling it's genre and franchise requirements before most people have set their phones to vibrate or made it back to their seats with their popcorn. It's almost cool. More action films should eschew expository buildup and try to swim the channel with one big gulp of air like this. However, I quickly realized that the economy of Predators opening is really just laziness. Producer/writer Robert Rodriguez is merely hedging his bets that if you paid to watch Predators-plural, well then you've likely already seen Predator-singular and therefore all his world-building has already been done for him by a much better director (John McTiernan). From the whiplash excitement of the opening, the rest of the film seems content to nonsensically race from one fan-service beat to the next until the whole thing begins to resemble a sweded youtube homage with a $40 million dollar budget. I was actually insulted throughout, considering I watched it under the perhaps delusional pretense that it was made solely for me. They thought this is what I wanted? Predators digests every individual ingredient that made the original film cool and then regurgitates them one by one, unapologetically serving them back to you with a smile and a wink. It's like a Greatest Hits album put out around Christmas time by a band that really doesn't have enough hits to justify a whole CD. The whole thing just reeks of cashing-in.
If there is one interesting thing about Predators (besides personally, how it made me feel really old and also showed me why it's finally time to let go of my childhood for FUCKSAKES) is what its Action Hero casting tells us about the difference between 2010 and 1987. Arnold Schwarzenegger is the hero of Predator, while Adrien Brody is the hero of Predators. Hold on, maybe that statement wasn't impactful enough, so let's do a visual comparison.
Action Hero - 1987
Action Hero - 2010
I think this clearly speaks to the Wussification of our culture and how boys no longer have clear representations of masculinity to aspire to. Gone are the Clint Eastwood's and Charles Bronson's. The Lee Marvin's and Steve McQueen's. Hell, even the Jean Claude Van Damme's and Steven Seagal's. In 2010, Adrien fucking Brody seemed an appropriate surrogate for Arnold fucking Schwarzenegger. Jesus. What happened?
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