Popcorn Kernels: Get To Da Choppa!

In which we review the Predator trilogy, because the forces of my life have conspired to make it a requirement to watch it. Keep an eye out for my Dread Central column and Geek K.O. podcast appearance, both about this franchise, both coming soon!

Predator

Year: 1987

Director: John McTiernan

Cast: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Carl Weathers, Kevin Peter Hall 

Run Time: 1 hour 47 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

An elite military squad on a mission in the Central American jungle runs afoul of a bloodthirsty alien creature bent on hunting them down.

Predator sure is a boy movie, innit? This whole franchise has definitely been one of the biggest gaps in my genre film knowledge, and it probably stems all the way back to the fact that I didn't play with toy trucks as a tot. This movie is the cinema equivalent of a blue onesie patterned with footballs, assigning a great deal of meaning to the sheer act of existing as a biological male. We get doting closeups of biceps flexing during arm wrestling (mid-air arm wrestling I might add, the lamest way to go about that particular display), lots of sweaty yelling in sleeveless/fabricless/shameless military vests, and a whopping one female character who has maybe two lines.

You don't hire Arnold Schwarzenegger by accident. Predator knew what it was doing and it sure as hell went and did it. But I do have to say... The man certainly cuts a striking figure onscreen, but he's a liability the second he opens his mouth. And I'm not talking about his accent. Look, I super duper knew the man couldn't act, but watching Predator, it's not so much something you know as something you feel deep in your bones; a primordial, ancestral revulsion that leaves you quivering in your seat.

Simply put, Schwarzenegger is an enormous liability in this movie (in every sense of the word "enormous"). He has way too much dialogue that isn't quippy one liners, which he shoves out through gritted teeth like a constipated school principal. The rest of the cast is fine, although the only reason anybody but Shane Black is here is to wear a vest that shows off their biceps.

Honestly, I found Predator pretty boring. The non-action scenes are numerous and entirely indistinguishable. People mutter nonsense in an endless expanse of green jungle while walking around with machetes. It's not compelling visually or narratively, it just exists, in much wider swaths than one might hope. The action itself is totally fine though, especially when the gore quotient amps up about halfway through.

However, there is no denying that the Predator itself is an unholy triumph of monster-making ingenuity. Stan Winston sure as hell knew what he was doing when he put together the wholly inhuman look of the creature, both masked and unmasked. With the mask on, he cuts the figure of a space-age knight, and with it off he's an unnaturally fleshy collection of organic odds and ends that you just believe. That is the true triumph of Predator, and the reason the movie earned itself (god) five additional movies at this point. You don't get that without a cool monster, no way no how.

Rating: 5/10

Predator 2

Year: 1990

Director: Stephen Hopkins

Cast: Danny Glover, Gary Busey, Kevin Peter Hall 

Run Time: 1 hour 48 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

This time, Los Angeles!

Because L.A. is the urban jungle, geddit?

That's about as deep as Predator 2 ever gets, not really utilizing its arbitrary near-future setting to make much commentary other than "things is violent in the cities." Instead, we get a Predator film grafted onto a Lethal Weapon as Danny Glover stalks through the LA streets taking the law into his own hands when the titular extraterrestrial gets in the middle of a gang war that tears through the city streets. This is emphatically not a bad thing.

Sure, Predator 2 is stupid, but so is Predator 1, and at least this movie has a kick-ass lady cop with actual dialogue. This is probably the only time director Stephen Hopkins has actually improved a franchise, but I'll take it. Predator 2 is weirdly demure in its violence (the 90's were a rough time for gorehounds), but the action is varied and fun (an early street shootout has some delightful stunt car work), kicking up the energy with its loony antics. And the dialogue scenes benefit from actors with actual charisma, including the reliably weird Gary Busey and the sniveling worm that is every character Bill Paxton played in late 80's.

The Predator's weaponry has also received an upgrade, and although his invisibility booster is still annoyingly on-the-fritz (I understand he needs to be invisible for a long time because that's expensive as hell otherwise, but the brief glimpses we get of the Predator early on are annoyingly obvious audience pandering), his new space arsenal is a creative expansion of the universe of the first film. Here, the design team turns traditional hunting weapons like nets and spears into alien weapons of mass murderization, combining the primitive with the high tech in a satisfyingly brutal way.

As always, the Predator is the most important element of this film, and they do get it right. Sure, it's an empty 90's action flick, but that's a sweet spot for bad-good cinema, so you won't catch me complaining.

Rating: 6/10

Predators

Year: 2010

Director: Nimród Antal

Cast: Adrien Brody, Laurence Fishburne, Topher Grace

Run Time: 1 hour 47 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

A group of strangers find themselves fighting for their lives on a Predator hunting reserve.

Is Predator the only trilogy that improves as it goes along? OK, probably nobody would agree with me, but I've finally found an entry in this franchise that I like! Predators is a delightful popcorn thriller, dumping a fistful of character actors (also including Walton Goggins, Mahershala Ali, and Danny Trejo),  into a scenario that's part Cube, part Lost, and full of Predator mayhem. Yes, these folks are also randomly wandering through a jungle, but this time there's actually a mystery to solve outside of "what is shooting us with lasers?"

Predators throws a lot of bizarre, dime-store Annihilation imagery at its characters before it reveals what's actually going on (given the title of the movie, it shouldn't be too hard to figure out), and the dynamics of the characters as they're funneled through a gauntlet of sheer revulsion and terror is a fun way to spend the plotty bits. And the cast really is game for bringing these crude, one-dimensional characters to life. Goggins channels his skills at chaotic evil, Trejo does his Trejo thing, I actually really like Topher Grace and he turns in some solid comic relief, and Adrien Brody gains 25 pounds of muscle and dang if that isn't a good distraction from how boring his character is.

Predators does fall apart somewhere in the middle of the third act, where the plot starts taking twists and turns that come out of nowhere to jostle the movie off its track, then vanish without a trace. But before that it's a tremendously satisfying one-time watch. Its subtext about how all the human beings themselves are "predators" falls flat too, but I can't say I expected much to start with, and at least it's trying something.

Then there's the Predators themselves! The design of the new Super-Predator isn't a particularly inspiring piece of work, but for the most part the film uses improved CGI to smooth out the very few rough edges of the classic design, and this is the first movie where the Predator's heat vision isn't incredibly crude and annoying. You can actually see what the Predator is seeing instead of chunky blobs of red and yellow that you can assume are Arnold Schwarzenegger because the blob has biceps. 

All in all, Predators did it for me, and I'm not ashamed to admit that. At this rate, Predator 6: The Predating is gonna be an out-and-out masterpiece!

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1337

Reviews In This Series

Predator (McTiernan, 1987)

Predator 2 (Hopkins, 1990)

AvP: Alien vs. Predator (Anderson, 2004)

Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem (Strause & Strause, 2007)

Predators (Antal, 2010)

The Predator (Black, 2018)

Left A Good Job In The City

Year: 2018

Director: Babak Najafi

Cast: Taraji P. Henson, Billy Brown, Jahi Di'Allo Winston 

Run Time: 1 hour 29 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

I'm so happy that the world at large has now noticed Taraji P. Henson enough to allow her to star in a major action film. I'm so happy that, looking at the trailer package that played before Proud Mary, there seems to be a steadier and steadier trickle of movies starring women kicking ass, and that some of them are even not white. I'm also happy that the director the studio chose to helm this project is of Iranian descent. I'm glad millions of dollars are being spent on telling these stories with these people. I just wish Proud Mary didn't suck, on top of all that.

Baby steps, baby steps.

Proud Mary stars off promisingly enough. Mary (Taraji P. Henson) is a hit woman for a black crime family in what appears to be Boston, and when she pulls a hit on a bookie, she discovers that he has left behind a young son named Danny (Jahi Di'Allo Winston). Wracked with guilt (but not so wracked that she didn't wait a year to do this), she eventually houses Danny in her apartment after he falls in with Uncle (Xander Berkeley), a Russian mobster and her family's prime nemesis.

Thus begins a maudlin drama of wills as she tries to become the mother Danny desperately needs while he resists the cozy domesticity she offers, because the only life he knows is the streets, man. So she murders Uncle and a bunch of his goons, igniting a gang war the likes of which these streets have never seen (i.e. boring). She must navigate her jealous ex Tom (Billy Brown) and his crime lord father Benny (Danny Glover) to get out of the game for good and help Danny escape the life that she built for herself and trapped him in.

And occasionally she wears this wig she bought from the Atomic Blonde secondhand shop on the corner.

Proud Mary starts off promisingly, and by that I literally mean its opening credits. Using the same color scheme and stylistic patterning of the poster you see above, it promises an almost Tarantino-esque blaxploitation riff; a 70's throwback that combines modern sensibilities with a retro, guns-blazing flair. That's what all the marketing would have you believe, but this movie is less Pam Grier and more Judy Greer, in that Henson is wasted in a role that has no idea what to do with her.

I guess I should have seen it coming. Although those credits have energy and gusto, honestly they're kind of... bad. The concentric shapes emitting from each image obscure what we're actually supposed to be looking at, the editing is too choppy to bother keeping track of it anyway, and everything is lit into a uniform brown mush. And then the 70's scheme is instantly dropped through a trapdoor, never to be seen again until the inevitable "Proud Mary" needle drop, which this movie does not earn.

What we do get is a heaping helping of non-starter drama wherein Taraji P. Henson and a little boy grouse at each other in a variety of thrilling action setpieces such as Closet, Clothes Store, and Hot Dog Cart. You might have paid for your whole seat but you'll only need the edge, because you'll be so antsy to get the hell out of the theater. And when the few-and-far-between action sequences do stop hitting the snooze button and rear their ugly heads, they're pretty uniformly unimpressive.

Yeah, the lighting and the editing and the blocking and the stunts and the music are generally underwhelming, but most importantly, nobody seems to have taught Ms. Henson how to hold a gun. She brandishes them one-handed like the Tin Man pre-oil, and it's mighty distracting. I'm not usually a stickler about gun use in movies, because I couldn't possibly care less, but it's hard to take it seriously when she's play-acting an action sequence like a five-year-old who just watched The Expendables. 

And literally every production still involves her holding a gun like she's pointing the way to the restrooms. Whose idea was this entire thing?

What were they doing with this movie? They assembled a great cast (Margaret Avery also shows up for a scene to cut some cake and generally be totally useless to the plot, though she does deliver from on high a wig so incredible that its handler gets a credit) for an awesome concept (Foxy Brown meets The Godfather!) and they immediately threw it all down the garbage disposal. 

I don't blame Taraji for any of this. She did her best with the noodly mess we're being asked to call a screenplay. And Jahi Di'Allo Winston is a totally serviceable child actor, maybe the most consistent in the film other than Margaret Avery's wig. But Danny Glover is giving the laziest performance of his career, dishing out some of his finest chair acting and moving as little as possible, taking generous, luxurious pauses between almost every other word. The producers and director clearly asked nothing from him and he provides it in abundance.

It's a mess from square one, to the point that the potentially rousing and triumphant "Proud Mary" action sequence feels like an insult to the intelligence, a desperate, flop-sweating insistence that this movie is fun in spite of all the evidence to the contrary. I know January is the dumping ground for movies that give you a head start on your Worst Of list for the year, but usually there is a modicum of entertainment in these. I'd watch the hilarious disaster that was The Bye Bye Man again in a heartbeat, but I never want to think about, let alone see, the boring, plodding disaster that is Proud Mary ever again. What a missed opportunity.

TL;DR: Proud Mary is a boring action movie, and more importantly a waste of its gargantuan potential.

Rating: 2/10

Word Count: 1002

Popcorn Kernels: Q4 2016 Review Purge, Vol. 2

It’s time to clear out more cobwebs from the ol’ backlog of 2016, to create a clean slate ready for Oscar season! So here are some reviews of flicks I watched in December 2016 that weren’t quite so vital to write about in full.

Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale

Year: 2010
Director: Jalmari Helander
Cast: Jorma Tommila, Peeter Jakobi, Onni Tommila
Run Time: 1 hour 24 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

In a secluded Finish mountain village, a young boy must stop the evil original Santa Claus from being unleashed upon his friends by a nearby mountaintop dig.

I love me some Christmas horror. There’s something about subverting all the manufactured Hallmark cheeriness of the season that appeals to me, and it helps that I genuinely love the holiday itself. But I genuinely wasn’t prepared for Rare Exports, a Finnish Christmas fairy tale with an unusually somber tone. It’s a stab at Guillermo del Toro-esque weight and spectacle that doesn’t seem fitting of the down-and-dirty genre that brought us Jack Frost and Santa’s Slay.

That tone is what allows it to stand out from the crowd, as well as its focus on a type of rural mountain community not normally seen in Hollywood cinema. The realism with which it presents the struggles of the townsfolk, which are getting tougher around Christmastime even without the invasion of a killer Santa, is outstanding. But the unfortunate fact is that these things are exactly what prevent it from being a particularly great Christmas horror film. The intent is spectacular, but the execution is rather lackluster, holding off on horror for a pretty dull 45 minutes of setup and throttling the film’s chances for entertainment with an overserious tone.

Fortunately, when the horror does kick in, it centers on a truly uncanny image that overcomes the abrasive protagonists (who accidentally trap what they believe to be an employee of the dig site and almost instantly decide to prod him with sticks and hold him hostage – delightful!), the jumps in logic, and the rather silly denouement. That image is of a silent, naked old man who crouches in the shadows, unmoving. It’s a sight that chills the spine enough that it doesn’t thaw until the credits roll.

And, to be fair, the silly finale is a tremendous bit of fun that leads to a charming concluding punchline. It just doesn’t necessarily feel like a natural extension of the almost neorealist goings-on that propel the first half of the movie. Visually speaking, Rare Exports is well made (especially a wonderful bit of business with the recurring image of an advent calendar), and the actors are decent, but the tone and the pacing are just a little too wonky to wholeheartedly recommend.

Rare Exports won’t be entering my Christmas season rotation, but it’s at least an interesting curio that I don’t regret watching. It’s a slice of sub-del Toro fairy tale fruitcake with an uncanny confidence in its own construction.

Rating: 6/10

The Color Purple

Year: 1985
Director: Steven Spielberg
Cast: Danny Glover, Whoopi Goldberg, Oprah Winfrey
Run Time: 2 hours 34 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG

In the South in the early 1900’s, Celie is married off to an abusive husband and relies on the strength of the women in her life to survive.

You couldn’t pay me to even pretend I care more about Steven Spielberg’s serious movies. I’m a Jurassic Park and Indiana Jones kind of guy. I’ve never seen Lincoln or Schindler’s List and I’m happy to let it remain that way. However, attached as I am to a certain drama-loving individual, recently I was given the choice to sit through The Color Purple or face a life of loneliness and regret. I chose the former, and thus was I introduced to Spielberg’s very first foray into the world of prestige drama.

And while the length of this film is indefensible (I could cut at least half an hour without batting an eye), spending time with these characters really did help th efilm grow on me. It doesn’t hurt that this is still a Spielberg movie, so as miserable as the characters’ lives frequently are, it never descends into the ultragrim territory of, say, Precious. And damn, is he a fun director.

The Color Purple might be maudlin as all hell, especially in its third act (a joyful reunion is pockmarked by a woman wearing an enormous flowing cape, for crying out loud), but visually speaking the man knows exactly what he’s doing. Whether it be the way he uses silhouette to portray Celie’s journey and self-identity, the recurring motif that links the sky with freedom, or the decision to stage its grandest scene of female empowerment around a dinner table, it’s clear that a great deal of thought, skill, and care went into this production.

Plus, the story (based on the Alice Walker novel of the same name) is a delicate and earnest tale about women that is still one of the more powerful narratives about female connection and empowerment out there. Although most of the people Celie meets throughout her life start out as enemies or rivals, they slowly realize they share a bond of sisterhood that can never be taken away from them or defined by the male (and white)-dominated society they’re trapped in. It’s wonderful stuff, despite some of Spielberg’s more cartoonish additions (a bar fight scene with Oprah looks like it was lifted straight out of Looney Tunes). Whoopi Goldberg gives an indelible debut performance, giving you intimate access to Celie’s thoughts and feeling using just her marvelously expressive face, the story is uplifting but doesn’t shy away from cold reality, and it’s good enough to forgive that grotesquely bloated run time. If that’s not a mark of true quality, I don’t know what is.

Rating: 7/10

Headhunters

Year: 2011
Director: Morten Tyldum
Cast: Aksel Hennie, Synnøve Macody Lund, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau
Run Time: 1 hour 40 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

An art thief/corporate recruiter must escape from an implacable assassin.

I should probably expand my scope a little before I make this assertion, but as far as I can tell, I love Norwegian movies. From films like Cold Prey or Dead Snow, it seems like the entire country has been gobbling up American genre films for decades until deciding in a snap that they can make some themselves. And they’re better. I can now expand this theory from sci-fi/horror to the action/thriller genre as well. Passengers director Morten Tyldum’s adaption of Jo Nesbø’s best-selling novel Headhunters is – put simply – a high-octane treat.

Although it’s a simple, snappy little crime thriller, it benefits from its European flavor. First of all, the lead isn’t preposterously handsome and debonair. He’s a regular Joe (or Jo) who just happens to be very good at stealing art. His lack of perfection makes his predicament seem that much more dangerous, because you’re not so certain that he can Jason Statham his way out of trouble. Plus, there’s a certain blasé attitude toward nudity and violence that makes the whole thing feel more visceral and human. While the filmmaking itself is very polished, the people and circumstances are not, giving it an edge that it wields like a razor-sharp blade.

I can’t say that I have much in particular to write about Headhunters, because it’s an elemental – almost primal – narrative, except to say that it’s a well-oiled machine. Every genre element is in the perfect position to keep your heart pumping along to its electric rhythm. It’s an exciting, harrowing, twisty, frequently gross tale of the lengths one man will go for survival. It has a James Bondian attitude toward women, which is always unfortunate, but it is what it is. And what it is is very captivating.

Rating: 7/10
Word Count: 1298

Came, Saw, Conquered

Year: 2004

Director: James Wan
Cast: Cary Elwes, Leigh Whannell, Danny Glover
Run Time: 1 hour 43 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

It's a bit uncouth in the film criticism community to share personal stories along with film reviews, but I've never been particularly couth to begin with, and the story of how I came to Saw is a very important part of my development as a horror fan.

You see, I have long denounced the Saw franchise for moral depravity and pointless gore, parroting an opinion I received in abundance during my formative years, during which there was a new Saw movie dropped on the world's stoop every year like a grisly present from a deranged cat. I learned from 22 Jump Street that there is a principle called "embedding" in which your brain sticks with the first idea it is given about a subject (see, movies are good for something), and that's exactly what I've been doing with this franchise.

Every criticism I leveled against the franchise and genre (moral bankruptcy, outrageous gore, trashy sensibilities) has been leveled against my own beloved genre, the slashers. The hypocrisy was getting so strong Courtney Love could have used it as a nightcap. And I was saying all this about something I'd never even seen and thus inadequately understood. You could say I was the One Million Moms of torture porn. Except actually successful.

But recently I decided to make an effort to turn this "blogging" thing into something more resembling a career. And my obstinate refusal to view the Saw franchise was inhibiting my path to becoming a successful analyzer of the genre for an utterly stupid reason. So no, I'm not throwing my morals away. I'm just realizing how misinformed they were. Over the next couple of weeks I will be visiting the Saw movies for the very first time, finally able to mock them for their real flaws instead of their perceived ones.

It's not like me changing my mind will actually alter the quality of these films, but nevertheless this is what my TV screen will look like for the foreseeable future and - who knows - maybe some surprises are in store.

As (flippin' A) pretty much everybody in the charted landmasses knows by now, the first Saw is actually really good and surprisingly un-gory, at least relative to its reputation. Except for the scene, the film plays more like a mystery thriller than an all access pass to Human Body: The Inside Story.

And on the relatively miniscule budget (about $1.2 million as compared to the sequels' mammoth budgets ranging between $4 million and a heart-stopping - for horror at least - $17 million), it would have been difficult for the green filmmakers to push it any further than they already had, especially with some of the well-known talent they had signed onto the project.

It all starts with a bathroom. Dr. Lawrence Gordon (Cary Elwes) and Adam (Leigh Whannell, the film's writer) wake up in a dingy tiled space, chained to pipes on opposite sides of the room with a corpse lying between them leaking enough blood to feed a low-income family of vampires for a week.

How uncharitable.

Like Cube before it and Nine Dead (among dozens of other clones) after it, Saw's plot hinges on victims with hidden pasts trying desperately to find connections, discover why they're here and who put them there, as well as hide the dirty truths that inevitably play important roles in their predicaments. It's a plot style that has received an enormous workout in the decade following 2004, but Saw's inventive visual style and intricate plotting (to a point) absolutely hold up in a big way.

It turns out that the two men were brought here by the notorious Jigsaw killer (Tobin Bell), a deranged madman who puts his victims - all people he feels are either immoral or not appreciating their lives enough - in elaborate traps forcing them to either go through terrible mutilation and learn a new respect for life or die in a terribly gruesome manner.

If you're one of the two people (it used to be three before this week) who hasn't seen this movie, I'll let the flashbacks throughout the film clue you in on why these two particular men are here (Of course there's copious flashbacks. This film couldn't survive as a one room drama, the flaws in the writing and dialogue would shine too strongly if they weren't diluted across different places and times.).

Although many one-room dramas could be improved with the implementation of a reverse bear trap,

Now it's not perfect. Saw definitely has its fair share of flaws, as tends to happen with lower budget indie films. Or, you know, anything made by humans. Some of the props are a little cheap-looking, especially the chains that bind our heroes. The locations tend to be a little spare, although their dinginess is tied into the tone of the film so it's not necessarily damaging to the film.

What is damaging, and the reason Saw rings a little hollow at times, is the dialogue and the acting. Side character Detective Tapp (Danny Glover) gets a sense of the hamminess present and has fun chewing out lines like "We'll strike under the cover of darkness," but Cary Elwes gets swept away in the current of his arch dialogue and swiftly drowns.

When his accent isn't busy popping its head out like a timid groundhog, he's spitting out lines like one would spit out teeth - with a vague sense of nausea and a hint of pure terror, unable and unwilling to comprehend what's going on. And I'm not speaking about the character. That would actually be a great choice. I'm speaking of Elwes specifically. He seems faintly mystified by this whole "acting" business, perhaps unmoored by the absence of Robin Wright.

When you're out-acted by the man who wrote the film, there's a serious problem. When you're out-acted by not just one but several corpses, perhaps it's time to call it a night.

Well, at least he was trying.

Luckily, Saw has just as many things go right. The visual style is impeccable, especially considering that director James Wan wasn't the supernova presence he is today. With only one feature under his belt, 2000's Stygian, he still had a lot to prove.

The camera work, especially around Adam's youthful and unpredictable character (Dr. Gordon is shot with much more long, careful takes, mirroring his character) is vivid and brisk. Compounded with rapid-fire MTV style editing, it shakes you out of your seat with its dynamic electricity. Especially memorable is series of fast motion scenes in the middle of the film that detail Jigsaw's handiwork in other scenarios.

And though the dialogue is off, the plot itself is dense and engaging with every new piece of information clicking into the old. Perhaps one of the best indications of this style is that every single item in the bathroom proves useful to some degree or another, whether it be the obvious items like the corpse's handgun and cell phone, or the other artifacts discovered among the assorted rubble. It's rather like a game of Myst, a lot of the fun comes from discovering how all the disparate pieces fit together. (Like, say, pieces of a... Jigsaw. BOOM! Metaphor'd!)

Sure, a third act reveal is pretty dumb if you decide to pull at threads, but when you're in the moment everything is gold. And that puppet is hella creepy.

You'd think tricycles wouldn't be scary. You'd be wrong.

So that's that! My very first Saw movie. Hold the applause. All in all, I really enjoyed it and I'm glad to be proven wrong, at least by this installment in what was soon to be a booming franchise. Please don't be too mean to me for taking so darn-tootin' long to do it. I'm here now and that's all that matters. And now I have six more films to complete my education in one of the most important horror series of the past decade.

I hope you'll stick around longer than most of Jigsaw's victims tend to.

TL;DR: Saw suffers from some dialogue and performance issues but is nevertheless a thrilling puzzle.

Rating: 8/10
Word Count: 1376
Reviews In This Series
Saw (Wan, 2004)
Saw II (Bousman, 2005)
Saw III (Bousman, 2006)
Saw IV (Bousman, 2007)
Saw V (Hackl, 2008)
Saw VI (Greutert, 2009)
Saw: The Final Chapter (Greutert, 2010)