Predators (2010)

The new "Predator" film, Prey, premieres today...and it's getting great reviews (Rolling Stone calls it "a masterpiece"—probably right before a fashion or fragrance ad), so guess what? Disney/Fox isn't releasing it to theaters, and has it streaming on Hulu.  Another "Mickey-Mouse" move from a studio that has surrendered to the online challenge and given up on "presentation".

And The Movies.

Here's a review of one of the series I thought was pretty darn good, written at the time of its release.

"Its Jungle. Its Game. Its Rules. You Run. You Die."
or
"Last Tango in the Game Preserve"

"Predators" drops you, literally, into itself. It opens as one of its combatants (Adrien Brody) is in free-fall, with no idea where he's dropped from and no idea where he's dropping to. All he knows is he's in free-fall. He doesn't even know if he'll survive the landing. Or how. All he knows is the panic, the wind, and the thing beeping on his chest in an increasingly accelerating rhythm.

 

Once he makes land-fall, he finds himself surrounded, by an impenetrable hostile jungle and a rag-tag clutch of mercenaries (Alice Braga, Walton Goggins, Danny Trejo—a new trailer for Machete is attached to the print—Oleg Taktarov, Louis Ozawa Changchien, Mahershalalhashbaz Ali, Laurence Fishburne—doing something very, very different this time, brilliantly) and a doctor (Topher Grace?!), an odd-man-out in a team of hostiles from every hot-spot corner of the Earth.

First, they must learn to trust each other—they're all loners, but Brody's character is more of a lone-wolf than others, interested only in survival, names are not important, and familiarity breeds empathy and weakness—which quickly becomes irrelevant when they discover that they are part of a deadly game—they are ruthless predators being pursued by an invisible implacable enemy for sport; these hawks have become quail, and they must use their inherent killer-instincts to put themselves in the running foot-steps of so may of their victims. The predators have become prey.

The "Predator" series was never a great series of films. The first one, with Arnold Schwarzenegger (which is referenced here) was the only good edition and it quickly degenerated into an also-ran cousin of the "Alien" series (and Agatha Christie's "And Then There Were None"). The concept didn't have anywhere else to go; it was a "one-idea" pursuit film that resisted expansion or depth...until this one. Predators (directed by Nimród Antal) slightly expands the concept and heaps on the irony of cut-throats getting their just desserts, while also giving the participants more back-story than the "Dirty Half-Dozen-or-so" of the first film.

Antal crams a lot into the story, never sacrificing pace, suspense or the "wtf?" quality necessary for this kind of "out-of-their-depth" story. It also manages to pay homage to fiction's Rosetta Stone of this sub-genre, Richard Connell's "The Most Dangerous Game." TMDG was at the core of the original, but "Predators" manages to take it several steps further, even incorporating that other "man-hunters-in-the-jungle" story, Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" (yes, the basis for Apocalypse Now) in a sub-plot.

Busy, busy film. And adroit. Tough-minded and unsentimental. Perverse and holding deeper truths...there's even a hint of a mystery story in there.  Entertaining and satisfying, if this is your bucket of blood.* Personally, this one tops the original, with a fine cast—who'd have though Academy-Award-winner Brody would be so effective in a role like this?**—and higher ambitions that it handles efficiently. A product of Robert Rodriguez's Troublemaker Studios, it shows how excellently this brand of B-movie entertainment can be produced.

* And it is violent...one scene has a predator ripping the spine and skull of a victim from its carcass and bellowing in its victory.  Despite the implausibility of such an act (ever try to do that with a chicken?), it's a powerful scene.  Filmed obliquely—the film is a hard "R," but doesn't stray into "X" territory (which you have to be REALLY over-the-top to earn from the Ratings Board)—it's a visceral moment.

 

** Roman Polanski, probably.  On second consideration, the whole of The Pianist is a similar story of being hunted during WWII, and Brody made you feel every twitch of his nerves in that one.  If you haven't seen that film (and I also delayed watching it for a long time because, frankly, I didn't want to see another film about The Holocaust), you owe yourself to get a copy and view it. Predators also features another Oscar-winner, the always terrific Mahershala Ali (under his original stage name).

Cowboys & Aliens

Written at the time o' the film's release...

"This Galaxy Ain't Big Enough for the Both of Us"
or
"Just My Ray-Gun, Pony and Me..."

Good idea, this. Two genres that have been around as long as there've been movies* and have served the same purpose—taking a theme that might be controversial if played in modern street-clothes, but dress it in rawhide or spandex and it takes some of the "edge" off. You'd think the two would go together as well as Zero-G and sawdust, but there have been already some tentative steps in anti-gravity cowboy boots: There have been westerns with a touch of fantasy—The Valley of Gwangi—and Sci-Fi with a western foundation (Outland was High Noon in space suits) but the two haven't really been combined as equal parts as in Cowboys & Aliens (the ampersand is required).

Loosely based on its comic source, it starts in familiar territory—a desert landscape, ancient river-beds long-since dried up and now sun-blasted bluffs and scrub.  Suddenly, a Man With No Name (Daniel Craig) lurches up into frame, sun-burned, bootless, bloodied with a wound in his side.**  He has no memory of who he is, where he is or why he's there (at one point a townie asks him "What DO you know?" "English" is the laconic reply). One odd thing—a thick manacle from wrist to forearm on his left arm. Smashing it with a rock would work with hand-cuffs, but this thing won't budge. He's set upon by riff-raff that he dispatches in a whirlwind of flying fists and gun-fire. So much for outfitting.  With newly acquired boots, shirt, vest and hat, he climbs on top of a pilfered horse and rides to a nearby town...with a loyal dog in tow. All the elements are in place.

A stranger in town (and everywhere, one assumes), he gets noticed and in trouble—mussing up the son (Paul Dano, really good) of the requisite town rich-guy-fascist (Harrison Ford, low and husky), and getting landed in the hoosegow by Sheriff John Taggart (Keith Carradine, whose Daddy appeared as a gambler in the granddaddy of Westerns, John Ford's Stagecoach). That's sounding like Howard Hawks' Rio Bravo, but about the time Ford's Colonel Dolarhyde (nice name for a rancher) arrives with some hired rough-necks to spring his boy, new arrivals appear in town—blue lights in the sky, which turn into flying ships—they recall fighter-jets in the daylight—that start blowing things up and (in a neat touch) lasso people and yanking them into the sky. The attack sets off The Stranger's fancy bracelet, which starts to "queep," pops up a sight, and knocks one of the ships out of the sky.

Suddenly, The Stranger gets a lot more interesting.

Because the invaders have been nicely particular about who they took—Dolarhyde's son, the Sheriff, the wife of the town's doc/bar-keep (Sam Rockwell, not used well enough, sadly), a posse is formed to find the kidnapees and at this point the movie turns decidedly conventional. It should. It's The Searchers, which begat Close Encounters of the Third Kind. And along the way, the posse manages to accumulate allies in a criminal gang, a tribe of Apaches (who are polite enough not to mention that "an invasion by strange aliens with weapons to take our resources" sounds vaguely familiar), and, for all I know, The Outlaw Josey Wales—who also accumulated an unlikely army that turned into family.  This is useful, because for the big battles with the Invaders, there needs to be a large number of red-shirts and red-bandanas to eliminate, so we don't lose the strays that make up the posse, which include a dog, the Sheriff's grand-son (Noah Ringer), and as Clancy Brown's Preacher (gotta have one of those, too) grouses, "We gotta dog and a kid, we might as well have a woman, too"   

That woman is Olivia Wilde, who spends most of the movie looking enigmatically sultry, while doing things that make you go "eh?" throughout the movie, beyond just the fact that as Craig gets more and more beat-up, her make-up never gets smudged. As welcome as Wilde's presence is in all this testosterone, her character is the most problematic, running inconsistently throughout the film—she's either "capable" or she isn't, and ultimately you realize that she's just a "device" that gets the screenwriters (a squad of them including the two that wrote Star Trek and the "Transformers" films—as opposed to the two who wrote the "Pirates of the Caribbean" movies) out of trouble. Mention should also be made of Adam Beach, who keeps getting better every movie, and Craig who does "the Eastwood thang" real good. Director Favreau (he of Iron Man fame, his chief skill seems to be impeccable casting), manages to direct it absolutely straight, with just enough of a hitch in the standard cliches to make things interesting, rather than well-trod.

Nothing is made of the irony of these new aliens making life difficult for "the natives," save for some terse nods of collaboration between members of the extended posse. That doesn't sadden me too much as most movies these days seem to want to beat you over the head with their "message," in case you don't get it. But, in so doing, Cowboys & Aliens manages to fulfill both the Western and Sci-Fi genre's abilities to put things in unique perspectives to throw a light onto our world. 

As I said, good idea.  A bit fun, too.

But, only a bit.

* As in The Great Train Robbery (1903) and A Trip to the Moon (1902). 

** It's not too unlike the beginning of Silverado where Paden (Kevin Kline) is found by Emmett (Scott Glenn), alone in the desert, robbed of everything but his skivvies.

Ant-Man and the Wasp

Just Another Phase
or
"Putting 'Quantum' in Front of Everything"

Ant-Man and the Wasp begins without any sort of preamble or warning. Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) recalls the day that his wife and partner Janet Van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer, who takes a LOT less CGI trickery to de-age her in the flashback sequence) was lost on a mission to stop a renegade rocket aimed at a large city. In order to gain access to the rocket's interior, Van Dyne, in her guise as The Wasp (original), had to go "sub-atomic" and was lost forever in "The Quantum Realm" never to return. Since that fateful day, Pym and his daughter Hope (Evangeline Lilly) have sought to reach her, and until the time that current Ant-Man Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) entered the Realm (in the last film) and survived, they have been working to try and find a way into the Realm to rescue her, with the help of the information that Scott might have retained that allowed their not-exactly-reliable ally to not only enter the Realm, but to return, as well.  Even if he could remember what it was he did. The odds, like everything else in this movie, are shrinking.

It does not help that Scott, due to his mis-adventures in Germany in Captain America: Civil War, is under two-year house arrest by the FBI, confined to his house with an ankle bracelet for both violating parole and crossing international borders, and getting media-attention-noticing giant-size while doing it. He's getting a little buggy doing it, learning magic with an online course (of COURSE, it's going to become a plot-point later on!) and restricting his Dad-time with daughter Cassie (Abby Ryder Fortson) during his custody-weekends.

Well...ya know...not really. Because, before you know, it Scott has been shrunk too small to keep his ankle-bracelet on, replaced with a large size ant, and kidnapped in a super-tiny car by Hope. Seems that Scott has been having "Quantum Realm dreams" in which it is thought that he might be channeling the small thoughts of Janet and, of course, Hank and Hope believe that Scott just might hold the key to finding her in the vast infinite expanse of what used to be a completely unknowable and scary dimension...when it manages to suit dramatic purposes.

Pym has improved his shrinking technology, so he can do it remotely, with seemingly no range and with no limitations to shrink things to absurd levels—he can take his research anywhere he wants by merely shrinking his office building to a handy portable size and expand it anywhere he can find a city-block size area (I hope the lights and toilets are self-contained). This seemingly limitless tech has caught the attention of arms-trader Sonny Burch (Walton Goggins in a performance that can best be described as "unfocused"), especially as he's been approached by Pym for a super-power-cell needed to juice up his "Quantum Tunnel." But, Burch's ambitions—they are never much explained beyond sheer avarice—are to steal the research lab (I suppose) once he learns its expanded and shrinking capabilities.

Geez, talk about taking your work home...

Also wanting it is "The Ghost" aka Ava Starr (Hannah John-Kamen), who has the rather ubiquitous power of "phasing"—becoming intangible and tangible at will— an unstable (except when dramatically necessary) power developed after her father, a researcher who had a falling out with Pym, attempted to activate his own in-development Quantum Tunnel causing a massive explosion.* Ava became a government orphan—we've all seen how well that works—who was supervised by Prof. Bill Foster (Laurence Fishburne), another in the seemingly endless disgruntled employees of Hank Pym. Foster's determined to cure Ava of her condition, and, somehow, he seems to think it involves finding Janet Van Dyne in the Quantum Realm...

Hey, maybe, these guys should work TOGETHER as they seem to want the same thi...Oh! Oh, yeah,  I forgot, it's a superhero movie. "When Titans Clash" and all that.

So, that (and Scott's issues with a suspicious clutch of FBI-minders) are all dealt with in the first hour and fifteen minutes. The following half an hour is, basically, an extended chase throughout the Chase-Scene Capitol of the U.S., San Francisco, as the various participants play "who's got the lab" keep-away, allowing Pym to travel through the Quantum Tunnel to the Quantum Realm (at one point, Scott says "Do you guys just put the word "quantum" in front of everything?") to try to find some quantum of solace with Janet (in a completely arbitrary time-limit straight out of "Star Trek") before she's trapped there for the next one hundred years...for some reason.

"Ghost" goes through a phase...and a mini-van.

This is one of the side-issues with Ant-Man and the Wasp: the sort of "magical thinking" when it comes to science (if you can call this stuff "science"). It's more like dramatically challenging mumbo-jumbo that offers the most conveniently dramatic challenges at the most appropriate stages of the story—it's the science of Star Wars, in other words. One can imagine Neil deGrasse Tyson holding his head throughout the thing.

It's just plain sloppy.  That goes for the film-making, too, as this one is again directed by Peyton Reed, but without the rigorous planning and plotting that Edgar Wright brought to the first one before he was fired by Marvel Studios over "creative differences." There are points in the movie with rough transitions (this thing had five writers), dicey motivations, unbelievable "saves" (how DOES tiny little Ant-Man TRAVEL so fast?!) and a mandate to "call-back" things that were clever in the first movie, but seem less clever when trotted out to remind you that this one's supposed to be clever, too—Scott ran across a pistol in the first one and the Wasp gets to run across thrown knives here (anybody thought of using "Raid?") or when Scott's business partner Luis (National Treasure Michael Peña is given truth serum—no, actually it IS truth serum and goes off on a rant that is lip-synced by many members of the cast.

Ant-Man and the Wasp, despite not having the "2" digit in it, runs afoul of the same issue most of the Marvel Studio's** "freshman" movies in their series seem to have***—they're eager to please but not eager to innovate, **** that is, until somebody comes in and shakes things up a bit...if it escapes Kevin Feige's attention, that is.

But, what am I griping about? At least the Marvel series manage to actually MAKE it to a no. 2 movie....

The "Quantum Realm" looks like recycled bits from the Fantastic Voyage re-boot.

Entertaining in fits and starts, but you really see the Quantum gears grinding on this one.  Oh...and stay for the mid-credit sequence, it ties in nicely with Avengers: Infinity War. (Somehow, I think they'll find a way out of it.)

* Lesson: don't do your highly unstable experiments around your kids.

** Their logo is starting to threaten becoming its own mini-movie these days.

*** The one exception to the rule being Captain America: The Winter Soldier, which had the dramatic advantage of not being set in the past, like its predecessor...and one can also point to Spider-Man 2 (but that wasn't a Marvel Studios movie).

**** I find that a shame, but if Marvel (and their Disney owners) are listening to all the gnashing of Star Wars fans' fangs, there is no incentive to.