Review: ‘Predators’ is a solid sci-fi action flick!

You have heard of them before and you know exactly what they are capable of. Only this time around they are more dangerous, gritty and deadly. A team of homosapiens are deployed as prey against an overwhelming threat. Unknown of what place they are in and why such motley crew have been assembled, it does not take much to sense of the lurking predators and notice the sky contains a few too many moons.

Spicezee Bureau

You have heard of them before and you know exactly what they are capable of. Only this time around they are more dangerous, gritty and deadly. A team of homosapiens are deployed as prey against an overwhelming threat. ‘Predators’ is a yet another game of death between the hunters and the hunted. It’s just that in earlier version (‘Predator’, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger), there was just one beast, here you have a number dreadlocked technically advanced monsters which pretty much explains the little ‘s’ in ‘Predators’. Nevertheless, the simple twist of plurality does supply a whole bunch of them, in various shapes and sizes. This, the third ‘Predator’ film (there have also been two ‘Predator vs. Alien’ spin-offs), opens with Royce (Adrien Brody) in a free-fall crashing hard onto the floor of the jungle. Soon he is joined by a group of eight who gathers to make sense of their situation. Most of them are mercenaries of various sorts, among them a Mexican drug cartel veteran (Danny Trejo), a Brazilian black ops sniper (Alice Braga) and a Yakuza assassin (Louis Ozawa Changchien). Topher Grace, playing a doctor and the least muscular of the bunch, also drops in for comic relief. The always entertaining Grace does help enliven the purposeful grimness of ‘Predators’. Unknown of what place they are in and why such motley crew have been assembled, it does not take much to sense of the lurking predators and notice the sky contains a few too many moons. It dawns on them that they`ve been transported to another planet to serve as little more than the game of a predator game preserve. After countering an attack by a pack of quadruped alien beasts, the group meets Noland (Laurence Fishburne), an air assault soldier who has survived on the planet for years by scavenging and hiding in an abandoned structure. He explains that the Predators sharpen their killing skills by collecting warriors and dangerous beasts from other worlds and bringing them to the planet to hunt. The "most dangerous game" thrill is so much the centre of ‘Predator’ movies that there`s almost nothing else to it. The hunter vs. hunted dynamic climaxes when the star — first Arnold Schwarzenegger, now Brody — covers himself in mud. However, much of the drama in ‘Predators’ comes not from the aliens but from the infighting among humans, who are predators, too. Rating: Two cheers for this one!