- UK release: July 2010
- Director: Nimród Antal · Writers: Alex Litvak, Michael Finch
- Studio / distributor: 20th Century Fox; Troublemaker Studios; Davis Entertainment
- Genre: Science-fiction action / survival hunt · Runtime: 107 minutes (BBFC 15)
- Main cast: Adrien Brody (The Pianist, King Kong) as Royce; Alice Braga (City of God, I Am Legend) as Isabelle; Topher Grace (Spider-Man 3) as Edwin; Walton Goggins (The Shield) as Stans; Laurence Fishburne (The Matrix, Apocalypse Now) as Noland
- Rotten Tomatoes: 64% critics / 52% audience · My rating: 7.5 / 10
Robert Rodriguez has wanted to make a Predator film for the better part of fifteen years, ever since a script he wrote for Fox in the mid-nineties got shelved as too expensive. He finally gets it made here, not as director but as producer and chief instigator, and the title tells you the strategy in a single pluralised word. More than one of them this time, and the first sequel since 1987 to remember that the original worked because it dropped a squad of hard men into a green hell and let something invisible pick them apart. After two increasingly silly Alien vs. Predator crossovers, going back to the jungle counts as a plan.
The setup
A man wakes in freefall, his parachute deploying just in time, and crashes into dense jungle with no memory of how he got there. He is not alone. One by one, other people drop out of the same sky: a cartel enforcer, an Israeli army sniper, a death-row killer, a Yakuza, a silent African militiaman, and one nervy doctor who looks badly out of place among the rest. They are killers, every one, and it does not take them long to work out that this is not Earth. The trees are wrong, there are two moons overhead, and they have been dropped onto an alien game preserve to be hunted. The only question is whether a group of people selected for being dangerous can stop turning on each other long enough to survive the things that brought them here.
The cast
The casting is the most interesting decision in the film, and it mostly pays off. Adrien Brody as a mercenary action lead reads as a gamble on paper, all the more so after he bulked up and dropped his voice into a Christian Bale rasp, but it works. Royce is cold, calculating and self-interested, and Brody plays him as a man doing arithmetic on everyone around him, which suits a film about predators and prey. Alice Braga gives Isabelle the conscience and the competence the group needs, and the two of them carry the spine of it. Topher Grace, cast hard against type as the meek doctor, supplies the unease, an ordinary man among professionals. Walton Goggins is all abrasive nervous energy as the death-row convict, exactly the loose cannon a survival ensemble runs on. Laurence Fishburne turns up late as Noland, a survivor of earlier hunts who has been alone too long, and gives the film a welcome jolt of strangeness.
The craft
Nimród Antal, who made the claustrophobic Hungarian thriller Kontroll and the home-invasion piece Vacancy, turns out to be a sound choice for this. He understands enclosed spaces and stalking tension, and he shoots the jungle for menace rather than spectacle. The film was made largely on built sets and Hawaiian location rather than green screen, and it shows in a tactile, sweaty physicality the crossover films lacked. The Predators themselves are practical suits and prosthetics where it counts, and Antal is sensible enough to keep them half-seen for as long as he can. John Debney’s score nods to Alan Silvestri’s original cues without simply copying them. The pacing is brisk, the 107 minutes never sag, and the action stays legible, which is not nothing in 2010. Where it stumbles is ambition: a couple of the hunters are barely sketched before they are dispatched, and a mid-film twist lands with a thud you can see coming.
How it stacks up
The obvious measuring stick is the 1987 Predator, and this knows it, borrowing the structure wholesale, a band of armed professionals whittled down in the green, while wisely not trying to out-macho Schwarzenegger. It is closer in spirit to that film than anything in between. The premise of dangerous people dropped into a kill-or-be-killed arena also puts it in the lineage of The Running Man and Battle Royale, though it is less interested in satire than either. What it shares with the best of the franchise is the simple, durable engine of the hunt, and a respect for the idea that the monster is scariest when you cannot see it.
Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have come down mixed but warmer than they were for the crossover films, sitting around 64%, with the praise going to the back-to-basics premise and the ensemble, and the criticism to thin characterisation and a sense that the film rarely betters its template. Audiences are cooler, nearer the middle at 52%, which reads like fans who wanted either more reinvention or more carnage. My own reaction sits above both. I came to it wanting competent franchise maintenance and a proper jungle hunt, and that is exactly what it delivers, with a better cast than it strictly needed.
Verdict
This is not a reinvention and never pretends to be. It is a confident, well-made return to a premise that has been mishandled for two decades, with a cast more interesting than the genre demands and a director who knows how to wind tension in a confined space. The thin characters and the telegraphed twist keep it from greatness, and it never quite escapes the shadow of the film it is paying homage to. But it is tense, good-looking, briskly cut and genuinely rewatchable, the kind of thing that holds up on a second viewing because the hunt itself still works. Solid franchise maintenance, done with more care than it had to be. 7.5⁄10.
Availability: In UK cinemas now, on general release from 9 July.
Update
Added since this review first appeared: the franchise carried on, with Shane Black’s The Predator (2018) trying a louder, more comic register before Dan Trachtenberg’s prequel Prey (2022) returned to the stripped-down survival-hunt idea this film had already reached for, and arguably did it better. Predators has settled into reputation as the best of the post-1987 entries, the one that understood what the series was for. It is widely available on disc and digital, and turns up on various streaming platforms depending on region.
BBFC content advice
Rated 15 by the BBFC for strong violence, gory images, language and sex references. The notes below may contain spoilers.
The BBFC’s full per-category content advice for the cinema release could not be retrieved from bbfc.co.uk at the time of writing; the rating and short consumer advice line above are confirmed against the Board’s classification of the film, passed 15 with no cuts. The 15 certificate reflects strong, bloody violence and gory injury detail, strong language, and verbal sex references across the film.
Source: British Board of Film Classification (bbfc.co.uk).
