Predators is a Robert Rodriguez film in all but director--it flips the script by having humans air-dropped onto a Predator-controlled planet rather than Predators using Earth as their private preserve, and all the humans are killers to begin with: an Israeli sniper (Alice Braga), a Special Forces wetwork specialist (Adrien Brody), a former African child soldier (Mahershala Ali), a Yakuza enforcer (Louis Ozawa Changchien), a Spetznatz officer (Oleg Taktarov), a guy who looks like Danny Trejo (Danny Trejo).
Okay; that is a good assortment of people.
The core cast are people you usually see in the background: Danny Glover, Ruben Blades and Maria Conchita Alonzo, as the toughest cops in L.A.; they get caught in what they think is a dust-up between three different street gangs during a heatwave, but turns out to be one Predator blooding itself on criminals, cops and soldiers alike.
That's the one my father thought we were seeing! "He's in town with a few days to kill." I'm guessing he just skipped Schwarzenegger and picked up the series with Glover, which now that I've seen Schwarzenegger seems a completely reasonable choice to me.
I love the use of the city as jungle, Glover is gloriously sweaty and emotional, and the final sequence is freaking incredible--not least because it sets the scene for Alien vs. Predator, a good fourteen years later.
I will check this one out. I'm not sure I've ever seen Glover in a lead role before.
Meanwhile, AVP is indeed far better than it has any right to be, but mainly because of Sanaa Lathan's full-bore performance as Arctic guide Alexa Woods.
She's pretty much the only element of the story either my father or my brother talked about, though enthusiastically. Otherwise I got some von Däniken-sounding stuff about Antarctica (Tanith Lee did Antarctic pyramids ten years earlier! In a vampire novel, no less!) and the idea of the uniquely lethal Aliens as the initiatory prey of adolescent Predators, which I did like.
It's comic-book and misic video-like in the extreme, wasting almost every other actor in a series of thankless set-pieces, especially Lance Henriksen as the elderly Charles Bishop Weyland (progenitor of Weyland-Yutani, model for the Bishop line of synthetics).
DON'T WASTE LANCE HENRIKSEN!
. . . Nonetheless, any one of these sounds like a more interesting movie than Predator.
no subject
Okay; that is a good assortment of people.
The core cast are people you usually see in the background: Danny Glover, Ruben Blades and Maria Conchita Alonzo, as the toughest cops in L.A.; they get caught in what they think is a dust-up between three different street gangs during a heatwave, but turns out to be one Predator blooding itself on criminals, cops and soldiers alike.
That's the one my father thought we were seeing! "He's in town with a few days to kill." I'm guessing he just skipped Schwarzenegger and picked up the series with Glover, which now that I've seen Schwarzenegger seems a completely reasonable choice to me.
I love the use of the city as jungle, Glover is gloriously sweaty and emotional, and the final sequence is freaking incredible--not least because it sets the scene for Alien vs. Predator, a good fourteen years later.
I will check this one out. I'm not sure I've ever seen Glover in a lead role before.
Meanwhile, AVP is indeed far better than it has any right to be, but mainly because of Sanaa Lathan's full-bore performance as Arctic guide Alexa Woods.
She's pretty much the only element of the story either my father or my brother talked about, though enthusiastically. Otherwise I got some von Däniken-sounding stuff about Antarctica (Tanith Lee did Antarctic pyramids ten years earlier! In a vampire novel, no less!) and the idea of the uniquely lethal Aliens as the initiatory prey of adolescent Predators, which I did like.
It's comic-book and misic video-like in the extreme, wasting almost every other actor in a series of thankless set-pieces, especially Lance Henriksen as the elderly Charles Bishop Weyland (progenitor of Weyland-Yutani, model for the Bishop line of synthetics).
DON'T WASTE LANCE HENRIKSEN!
. . . Nonetheless, any one of these sounds like a more interesting movie than Predator.