Predators

The other day I saw a huge advert for the A Team movie, before which passed a bus advertising the new Predators movie. Walking past newstands proclaiming Tory cuts to the public sector I felt I had to quickly check the date on a newspaper, as I strongly suspected that somebody had thrown the whole world into the Hot Tub Time Machine.

Turns out not. Someone's just decided to crap out a load of mediocre eighties remakes. Also someone's decided that nerds are the new musclemen. Or at least they're getting nerds to buff up to portray the new muscle men. Adrien Brody is woefully miscast in this. At times he looks perilously close to Peter Mandelson, which makes the moment when he shows off his six pack in all its sinewy-Adam-Ant-skinny-people-just-look-weird-when-they-work-out glory somewhat disconcerting.

Most of the other acting is fairly abysmal. Whenever Alice Braga is called upon to portray any sort of cognitive process, or indeed simply show emotion, she looks like she's just been given a really hard sum. And then Laurence Fishburne turns up. And he delivers a performance so inexplicable I finally experienced how a character in an H P Lovecraft story must feel when they decide that the horror before them is unspeakable.

It also reveals a fairly unsettling insight into white America's racial hierarchy. Blacks are fairly near the bottom, but it turns out not as low down as Mexicans. Both are apparently more expendable than a murderous, ambiguously incestuous con on death row. The Japanese do fairly well, but not as well as white Americans and Israelis who despite all of their documented moral failings survive. And then fall in love. Not that I could really get worked up about the mindless amorality of it all, given how generically this bestiary of morons was drawn in the first place.

Worst of all, this film isn't even steaming. It's all executed efficiently. So it isn't even a so-bad-it's-fun. It just isn't any fun at all.

Oh yeah and the Predator redesign is balls, too.

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