copyright © Jedo Dre 2011

It has been ages since the first Predator movie - ages full of sequels of exponentially worsening quality. Having stood on the Predator island for a while, we got bored and had moved to the Predator vs Aliens peninsula for a while where we married the two different alien species so that they can rip puny humans apart more efficiently and...yeah, let us just say that concept works a lot better in video games. With Predators the predator moved out of the Alien's apartment, taking his stuff with him in order to go back to the roots. As with the first film, we are back to the hot jungle with a group of armed folks in a desperate need of a restraining order against predators...get it?.....Sorry. Anyway, the formula is almost identical to the first Predator movie in an attempt to recapture its success.


The first victim of this new hunt is pacing. The characters are dropped into the situation completely clueless and thus have a lot of discovering to do. Such an extreme drop-in requires a long and thorough introduction, but the movie director must have a Hollywood schedule to keep to and that results in some unnatural dialogue forced into the movie to explain it so that the whole thing can move forward. Then, after the first few action scenes, the whole thing suddenly slows down for a dark interim period.


The dialogue is then the second victim. This is often the case in action movies (hence the name), especially when half the characters consist of speechless monsters and this was the ailment from which the first Predator suffered also. This is probably why the actors back then did not talk too much and they should have kept the habit. But occasionally the dialog recovers and evolves into something more interesting. It is like the script was written by two different writers who never met to discuss it.


On the other hand the cast does well. There are no big action stars in this one. They all left the room to give the runners up more breathing space. The remainders feature an interesting mismatch of people like Foreman from "The 70th Show" (accedently one of the more interesting characters). This variety gives the movie colour, and because the characters don't get killed off too early, they end up being more than just faceless cannon fodder.


The people behind the camera are doing a good job, and surprisingly, computer generated effects take a back seat on this one. There is plenty of them, but there is much more attention to physical props, again reminiscent of the 80s.


There are many worse action movies out there and this one is much less forgettable than the recent Predators vs Aliens movies. This is definitely worth seeing. Also, I am glad they finally brought in a Russian as one of the good guys.

Predators