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Royce (buffed-up Oscar winner Adrien Brody) faces off with an alien hunter in “Predators.” |
Fast-paced, taut with tension, stuffed with suspense and mystery, “Predators” is easily the best entry in 20th Century Fox’s science-fiction alien-hunter action franchise.
For the first 55 minutes.
Then, as if a key mechanism on a soaring rocket malfunctions, “Predators” sputters and fizzles.
It slows to a crawl, weighted down by too many zany plot twists, too many last-second rescues from certain death and too many “he’s not really dead!” scenarios.
But for the first half, “Predators” is sublime summer monster movie nirvana, beginning with a classic homage to the old “Twilight Zone” TV series.
Eight strangers wake up in the middle of free-falling through the air with parachutes standing between them and fatal squishdom.
Most are military (Adrien Brody, Alice Braga, Danny Trejo, Oleg Taktarov, Mahershalalhashbaz Ali). One is a doctor (Topher Grace). One is a death-row inmate (Walton Goggins). One an Asian gangster (Louis Ozawa Changchien).
They don’t know where they are, or how they got there. Braga’s soldier says she doesn’t recognize the strange jungle they’re in.
When they finally notice the three moons above them, they know they’re not even on earth.
Nobody uses names.
Brody’s mercenary soldier becomes the natural, reluctant leader, the one who puts together the puzzle first: “This is a game refuge,” he concludes. “And we’re the game!” (Read more…)