REVIEW: The Predator

There are a few notable trends that I keep noticing in modern movies that I'd like to talk about for just a bit. The first (and most irritating) is Hollywood's obnoxious over-reliance on 80's nostalgia. G.I. Joe, Transformers, Ninja Turtles, Robocop, Terminator, Thundercats, Ghostbusters; if it existed in the 1980's, you're probably gonna see its fetid corpse unearthed and propped up by a hack studio to make a quick buck. We've also witnessed the rise of the soft-reboot; a film that is, for all intents and purposes, a remake/reboot of a classic film franchise, except it's stated to take place in the main series continuity, making it a sequel, and thus okay. I feel like the most notable of these is The Force Awakens, but it's hardly a rarity nowadays, especially for big-budget franchises with a lot of brand recognition. We've also been seeing a lot of movies get utterly destroyed through reshoots. Normally, reshoots are a relatively innocuous practice, but it feels like as of late, more and more big-budget projects are suffering the slings of studio interference, producing an end result that turns out worse than anyone could have possibly predicted. The reason I choose to mention all of these phenomena is that Shane Black's The Predator manages to be a sterling example of all three with shockingly little effort.

The film opens as one would expect a Predator film to, with a spaceship hurtling towards Earth. After crash-landing in the South American jungle, everyone's favorite human-hunting space monster has a run-in with an Army Ranger by the name of Quinn McKenna (Boyd Holbrook). Battered from the crash, the Predator (Brian A. Prince) is actually incapacitated by the hard-boiled sniper, who makes off with the creature's mask and wrist gauntlet. Sensing that he's seen something he wasn't meant to have seen, Quinn mails the alien tech back home before he's taken into custody by government agents. Naturally, the government has captured the Predator as well, who inevitably escapes and sets out in search of his stolen gear (which has since ended up in the hands of McKenna's autistic son, Rory, played by Jacob Tremblay). With the help of a renegade biologist (Olivia Munn) and a ragtag gang of disabled veterans, it's up to Quinn to keep his son out of the way of an interplanetary blood war, all while avoiding the shadowy government agents who want him disappeared. Despite how exciting that may sound, I assure you large chunks of this movie are dull as all get-out.

When this movie was first announced, I was understandably optimistic. Shane Black is a solid director (who also starred in/wrote parts of the original Predator), and a natural choice to helm the next entry in the franchise (redundant title notwithstanding). Predator is one of those rare films like Robocop that works both ironically and unironically well; it's the movie that made Arnold Schwarzenegger an action superstar, and it's chock-full of all the hilariously dated tropes and clichés one would expect from such a film. At the same time, it executes its deceptively simple premise startlingly well, balancing both action and suspense until things reach a head at the surprisingly small-scale climax. It's got all the excess that 80's action movies are lauded for to this day, but it also understands and appreciates the effect some quieter, more intimate moments can have when establishing atmosphere and tone. If they wanted to have a soft reboot of Predator that took itself seriously for the most part, they could certainly do so and have it work out nicely; 2010's Predators is living proof of this.

Alternatively, if Shane Black wanted to turn the whole thing into an utter farce, lampooning the various action tropes that the original Predator helped establish, I could see that working out as well; plenty of relatively serious films have successfully made the transition to more comedic fare as time's gone on (the most notable example that comes to mind being the Evil Dead trilogy). Black has a penchant for snappy dialog, and his role as Hawkins in the original film provided much of the early comedic relief. This appears to be the approach that The Predator is going for, but unfortunately the whole thing runs into a critical error; it's not particularly funny. There's a few one-liners that got a sensible chuckle out of me, and the gore has the tendency to reach Monty Python and the Holy Grail levels of cheap, slapstick-y excess, but I doubt anyone would describe The Predator as a rollicking good time (unless a character saying "get to da choppa" before escaping on a bunch of stolen motorcycles is your idea of clever writing). Really, the script here is so bad that it gives Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom a run for its money, with such winners as "Motherf-cker hacked our vehicles" and "F-ck me in the face with an aardvark".

In the film's defense, the first act is more or less exactly what I wanted it to be; it's by no means groundbreaking, but it's a reasonably fun monster movie with some solid action (in particular, the sequence in which the Predator escapes from a government lab). But everything goes downhill quickly soon after that scene, up until the point that our bigger, badder, entirely CGI rival Predator shows up. After this new monster is introduced, the entire film breaks and goes down the drain, devoid of any intellect or charm it may have possessed beforehand. Before that point, the lackluster performances, groan-worthy one-liners, and bland, forgettable characters were just sort of there, but it was around this time that it all compounded and started actively making the movie worse, dragging it down into the realm of pure trash. From what we've learned, apparently the entire third-act of the movie was rebuilt from the ground up at the behest of 20th Century Fox, so it seems as though this is another film that may have had the potential to actually be something not terrible before a bunch of studio suits decided to stick their slimy paws all over it. Honestly, I'd have happily accepted a Predator movie that was "just okay", but instead got something that appears to put active effort into being terrible. And that's not even touching the way The Predator attempts to tackle such weighty topics as mental illness and climate change.

There was a clear attempt at having some subtext, pitting a team of mentally-disturbed veterans and a young child with Asperger's up against an alien menace who has modified his own DNA to become a genetically-perfect being. Truth be told, giving the main group of heroes in an action/slasher flick a host of neuroses and disorders to deal with in addition to the impending extraterrestrial threat is a pretty fascinating idea that could really result in something spectacular if handled properly by a talented filmmaker (like, say, Shane Black). Instead what we get is a series of jokes where the punchline is "the guy with Tourette's said something profane" and a kid who can use the power of autism to operate alien technology as if he were R2-D2. The disorders in this movie are treated as either a punchline or a plot convenience; I'm not even going to harangue The Predator for how potentially offensive such a portrayal is, that's just lazy writing. I'm still struggling to wrap my head around how this even turned out so bad; this is a movie written by Shane Black and Fred Dekker. These are the guys who gave us The Monster Squad for crying out loud, what the hell happened? Was this a Producers-esque scam? Or did the studio seriously interfere that much? No amount of explanation is really going to save this trainwreck, but I'll admit that I'm the least bit curious.

I'll admit, for all of its problems, The Predator would actually make for a pretty good bad movie. I can easily see this working well in a room full of intoxicated friends, or with a rowdy audience at the local theater; but at the same time, it's important that everyone understand that statements such as these aren't exactly points in the film's favor. If the kindest thing you can say about a movie is "it's not offensively bad, it's just stupid and forgettable", there's clearly a problem, especially when talented people are involved. It could be fun with the right audience, but then again so is the first Predator. Predator didn't need to be "ironically good", it was just "good". Every idea we see here (Predator hounds, genetic modification, a crazed government alien-hunter, a ragtag gang of ex-military guys throwing out vulgar banter, etc.) was already done far better in other Predator movies (yes, even Predator 2). Is it the worst thing ever? No. But is there a solid reason to run out and watch it? Also no.

If you're at all curious about just how stupid the plot to The Predator can get, make sure to check out my fresh-out-of-the-theater plot rundown on YouTube!

REVIEW: The Meg

Honestly, what did you even expect? Am I supposed to talk about The Meg like it's a real movie, and not just an absurd pile of schlock made to milk millions and millions of dollars out of the ever-growing Chinese movie market? We've all watched the trailer, we all know what this movie is about. There's a giant prehistoric shark and Jason Statham is gonna go deck it in the schnoz. I knew what I was getting into when I bought my ticket, and I got exactly what I expected. It's a curious kind of situation, since this is a blatant cash-grab without an ounce of creative intent behind it; one could very easily make the case that movies like this are causing the death of cinema the world over. But then again, I didn't exactly have a bad time with The Meg, so that raises the question of whether or not there's a place for big-budget trash, so long as it at least manages to be enjoyably entertaining.

The plot is, as one might expect, basically just an excuse to get Jason Statham to duke it out with a giant shark. I actually wasn't expecting it to take so long to really get going; this is a movie that, surprisingly enough, sticks by the genre convention of not showing the monster until after the first act is finished. An exploratory expedition is sent to the bottom of the Marianas Trench on the off-chance that the bottom of the ocean isn't actually the bottom; it turns out that the researcher's hypothesis was correct, and that the "bottom" of the trench was really just a cloud of super-cold hydrogen-sulfide or whatever. It's B-movie science, so I don't really feel the need to pick it apart that much, the important thing is that there's megalodons in them hills, and wouldn't you know it the submarine they've sent down to investigate just so happens to be piloted by Jason Statham's ex-wife (Jessica MaNamee). After rescuing the submarine, the megalodon follows the team up through the resulting gap in the thermocline, entering into an all-you-can-eat buffet of whales, boats, and tasty tasty humans. The Meg's got a hankering for some Chinese food, and it's up to Jason Statham to make it extinct all over again.

Let's talk about Jason Statham for a bit, because he's honestly the lynchpin that makes this movie work at all. I'm not sure if he legitimately thought this was a good script or if he's just a true professional, but while literally everyone else is yukking it up and not even trying (except for Li Bingbing, who I'm sure isn't as terrible when she doesn't have to speak English), Jason Statham is taking his role as a submarine-driving shark fighter 110% seriously. See, my problem with movies like Sharknado and the like is how they're so obviously made to be comedies. You can't intentionally make a movie that's so bad it's good. That's just not how it works. A person slipping on a banana peel is funny. A person throwing themselves to the ground intentionally with the intended goal of making people laugh is just embarrassing.

With Statham putting in a totally stone-faced performance, he ends up acting as the straight-man to literally everything else in the movie, and the end result provided more than a few laugh-out-loud moments. Sure, it's not exactly low-concept humor, but I defy anyone to watch Jason Statham throw on a wetsuit and dive into the ocean to go confront a shark the size of a Greyhound bus and not at least crack a smile at how absurd a visual it is. Tonally, it very much reminded me of something like Deep Blue Sea or TriStar's 1998 Godzilla reboot. I grew up loving these schlocky monster movies, as mediocre as they may be, and I could very much see someone getting the same kind of enjoyment out of seeing Jason Statham take on the Meg in the same way I got a kick out of watching Saffron Burrows and LL Cool J take on a gang of super-smart makos. The only problem is that, for as big and bombastic as The Meg tries to make itself appear, the action we get comes off as totally toothless, especially for a B-movie about a giant shark.

It's safe to say that, after serving as the villains in so many monster movies, sharks have gotten something of a bad rap. As I'm sure we've heard time and time again from various Snapple facts, you're actually about 23 times more likely to die from being struck my lightening than you are to die from a shark attack. Ever since Jaws came out, they've been portrayed mostly as mindless eating machines, despite even species as fearsome as the great white coming close to becoming endangered. Shark finning is a serious problem (as The Meg takes the time to tell us about in an odd, tonally-dissonant moment) and it's important to remember that sharks aren't monsters; they're simply animals doing what animals do. With all that said, The Meg is a monster movie about a giant dino-shark terrorizing the Pacific. As far as sharks go, it's not a stretch to say that they're just swimming mouths; biting, gnashing, and eating are about the only means of attack they have. So, to quote the film's lead, "Where’s the f---ing blood? It’s like, 'There’s a shark.'"

Half the fun of these kinds of monster movies is watching a cast of paper-thin characters eat it when the titular terror decides to eat them. While we do get a few good deaths here and there, they're all completely bloodless; the film avoids showing any humans getting chomped or ripped apart, opting instead for everyone to just be cartoonishly swallowed whole. It really puts a damper on an otherwise perfectly enjoyable B-movie, since well-done gore can add a ton to the enjoyment factor of an otherwise unremarkable movie. The only problem with turning a movie like The Meg into a blood-soaked gore-fest is that such violence would inevitably result in an R rating, greatly cutting into the film's potential profit margins. Seeing as how The Meg has already managed to out-perform the latest Star Wars movie, I suppose this gambit paid off. I can honestly say I'd have had more fun with it if I also got to see some blood and gore (and let's be honest, some tongue-in-cheek nudity never hurt anyone either), but those box office numbers don't lie. I saw a 9:45 showing with some friends at our local cinema, and just one row in front of us was a pair of parents with two kids who couldn't have been older than 6 or 7. They even brought blankets and stuffed animals, presumably for if the kids got bored (or fell asleep, considering we left the theater just after midnight); truly, The Meg is a movie with universal appeal. The only problem is that the movie's attempt to please every single paying demographic leaves it without a real sense of identity, and its hesitation to commit to a singular tone or audience leaves the whole thing feeling somewhat middling overall.

All in all, The Meg is a fun enough time, I suppose. It's surprisingly competently made (there's a fake-out just after one of the larger action sequences that actually got me) and the effects look pretty solid for something that was mostly shot in massive water tanks surrounded by green screens. At the end of the day, I paid for my ticket to see Jason Statham fight a giant shark and got to watch Jason Statham fight a giant shark. All in all, not a bad way to spend an evening; I know "I don't regret spending my money" isn't exactly the highest praise a film can receive, not every movie I've paid to see this summer can make the same boast. There are definitely better B-movies out there (and certainly better shark movies), but The Meg is an altogether inoffensive excuse to get together with some friends and share some laughs. Just don't expect anything even remotely memorable, original, or intelligent.