The Case for One Night Out Hunting

I like Topher Grace. Besides the quite quirky name, he managed to bring life to a two dimensional That 70s Show character and managed to score the red-headed Amazonian to boot, and he manages to inject a world weary youthfulness to almost every role he inhabits. It's a pity that has agent hates him. You can tell this because he appears in Predators.

Of course, Laurence Fishburne and Adrien Brody appear as well, so the film is not lacking in star wattage. But then, no amount of star power can really rescue what is a fairly dire film.

The original Predator was, of course, quite awful. It was full of macho posturing, ridiculous one liners and Jesse the Body Ventura. And of course Arnie. And lots and lots of guns. All of which turned an awful product of 1980s macho nonsense into a work of enduring filmatic beauty - albeit not one to everyone's taste.

Predators harkens back to that original, putting everyone back in the jungle and arming a lot of them with some pretty impressive firepower. But gone are steroidally enhanced bodies (though the egos are still as big as ever) and in is the slimmer, more athletic look, though Brody does lather up in heat signature-reducing mud in homage to Arnie's impressive physique, and even tries out the old "come on" taunting line as well. Another point of difference is that the characters are no longer gung ho soldiers, but instead a rag tag bunch of mercenaries and less monetarily-minded murderers.

So far, so full of potential. But then the ludicrous plot twists of the already fairly flexible logic applied to this imaginary universe start to grate: how long does it take the group to look up at the sky and realise something is different? The Predators may be ultimate warriors, but why is all their technology controlled by remote control - and why do all of them have a key to the car?

The ultimate travesty though is that the film tries to add things like plot at the sacrifice of the most valuable commodities in an action film: movie length and pacing. Yep, it drags in places, unfortunately mainly at the end, when the writers appear to have decided that the group of humans that has not been blasted into tiny pieces or eaten by toothy dogs is now small enough to try and develop into fully rounded individual characters - a huge mistake when all the audience wants is the final confrontation or seven.

On the plus side, the tension does build, especially at the beginning, and there is the much anticipated Predator-patented "death by rapid spine removal" scene, which had me thinking that they really missed an opportunity by not filming the whole thing in 3D.

But, at the end, the full session packed up and went home, either muted or muttering about some fairly off colour dialogue. I was in the more muted camp, the tedious pacing of the final leaving me closer to the land of nod than to the edge of my seat. It met most of my expectations in its awfulness, which was good, but it let itself down by trying to be more, even if it didn't try very hard.

Verdict: Predators is a film to watch purely if you like the Predator film franchise, and even then, it will probably turn out to be less than you expected. 2 saliva-covered mandibles out of 5.