REDUX REVIEW: Predator (1987, John McTiernan)

For this film-by-film look at the career of Arnold Schwarzenegger, I’ve been watching his movies in a random order and jotting down a few thoughts. The Schwarzenegger Says quotations are taken from Total Recall (2012), Arnie’s brilliantly bonkers autobiography.

Watched: 28 September 2019
Format: A second-hand DVD found by my friend who works in the St Christopher’s Hospice charity shop in Sydenham, south-east London.
Seen before? Yes, when it was first released on VHS and a few times since.

Note: I have already reviewed Predator on this website. I wrote about it in 2016 when I considered all the Alien and Predator movies as if they were part of the same series. You can check out my original Predator blog here, while this piece will focus on the film’s star.

Review: Before he was an actor, Arnold Schwarzenegger was a bodybuilder. A childhood liking for sports led to a teenage fascination with physical training, and while completing his Austrian national service in 1965 he actually went AWOL in order to attend a bodybuilding competition. (He subsequently served a short spell in the cells.) Titles such as Mr Universe and Mr Olympia followed, the latter seven times between 1970 and 1980. Schwarzenegger’s global fame began to grow.

At the 1975 Mr Olympia championships in South Africa, in fact, Arnie’s experiences were documented by a film crew and the resulting feature, 1977’s Pumping Iron, went a huge way in popularising both the sport and its most notable competitor. (It also boosted the career of Schwarzenegger’s rival Lou Ferrigno, who was soon cast as the title character in the TV show The Incredible Hulk.) Having appeared in some small films and a major Robert Altman movie, Schwarzenegger now shifted focus to an acting career…

He’s far from the only Hollywood performer to have transferred into the profession from elsewhere, and indeed there’s been a constant stream of action stars who were known in other fields first: swimmer Johnny Weissmuller and diver Jason Statham, footballer Vinnie Jones and gridiron player Fred Williamson, fighters Steven Seagal, Bruce Lee, Gina Carano, Hulk Hogan, Chuck Norris and Jean Claude Van Damme, drummer Luke Goss… The 1987 jungle-mission movie Predator actually has a trio of them. Supporting Schwarzenegger in the cast are ex-NFL player Carl Weathers and pro-wrestler Jesse Ventura.

But there’s something different about Arnie, something that distinguishes him from all the others. It’s not his acting, which even by the time of Predator (his 12th movie) was still flat and unconvincing. (Carl Weathers, conversely, makes you believe in his character totally.) No, it’s that indefinable X factor: star power. In Predator, for example, Schwarzenegger’s performance is in no danger of being confused with Robert De Niro. The appeal and success of Major Dutch Schaefer as a character is not in the delivery of the dialogue or an ability to convey hidden meaning. It’s in the sheer charisma, the panache; the way Schwarzenegger lights up a cigar or arm-wrestles with a colleague or smirks in the face of adversity. It’s physical, visceral, primal, even a bit sexual. (Predator is loaded with homoerotic visuals.) By 1987, with hits such as Conan the Barbarian and The Terminator behind him, Schwarzenegger was a huge draw who commanded a salary of $3 million. People liked him and there was patently something special going on in these films. Something that still defies reasoned analysis. Simply put, they were *cool*. So was their star.

And while Predator has its flaws – see my earlier review for a more detailed discussion – it’s still a well-staged and exciting action movie. Having enjoyed seeing it again, in fact, I think that my 2016 review was a touch harsh in scoring it seven out of 10. Let’s boost that up by one here.

Schwarzenegger Says: ‘Predator was more of an ordeal than a pleasure to make. There were all the hardships you’d expect in a jungle: leeches, sucking mud, poisonous snakes, and stifling humidity and heat… [Director John] McTiernan turned out to have been a great choice, and you could see from Die Hard the next year that his success with Predator was no fluke.’

Eight ugly motherfuckers out of 10

Next: The 6th Day

Predator 2 (1990, Stephen Hopkins)

Spoiler warning: these reviews reveal plot twists.

Los Angeles, 1997. A predator is loose in the city and is picking off rival gang leaders…

The cast: The lead is Danny Glover, who’d recently played another cop in two Lethal Weapon films. In fact, Lieutenant Mike Harrigan is basically Lethal Weapon’s Riggs and Murtaugh combined into one person. It’s an unconvincing performance. Kevin Peter Hall climbs into the predator suit again, though this is a different individual from the 1987 film. Gary Busey is another Lethal Weapon alumnus, here miscast as a shifty agent called Peter Keyes. Maria Conchita Alonso is Harrigan’s spunky sidekick, Detective Leona Cantrell, and is just as rubbish as she had been in The Running Man. Bill Paxton adds a bit of fun as light-hearted detective Jerry Lambert. Robert Davi (Die Hard, Licence to Kill) has a tiny role as the police chief. Adam Baldwin (later a regular in Firefly) is Keyes’s second-in-command. During an info-dump about the events of Predator, we see a character from that film on a monitor: presumably because Arnold Schwarzenegger’s image rights were too expensive, it’s Anna Gonsalves rather than Dutch Schaefer.

The best bit: The predator attacks a subway train. A great set, which convincingly shuffles from side to side, and epileptic lighting. Scary stuff.

Crossover: The creatures from the Alien and Predator films first appeared together in February 1990 in a comic book called Dark Horse Presents #36. As a nod to the comic, the Predator 2 design team placed a xenomorph skull in amongst the predator’s trophies of its kills – the idea was suggested by special-effects boffin Stan Winston. Additionally, this film features a casting crossover with the Alien series. For a giggle, let’s assume that Bill Paxton’s Detective Lambert is the great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather of Private Hudson from Aliens.

Review: The first image of the film is terrific. A helicopter shot swoops over thick woodland, making us think we’re back in the world of the first movie – but when it breaks the treeline we see Los Angeles in the distance. The urban jungle of LA is, for some reason, set a few years into the future. So it’s therefore grimy, rundown, trashy, and there’s a war going on between ethnic-minority gangs over money, cocaine and power. Right from the first scene this is over-the-top, schlocky stuff that’s difficult to take seriously. The script is clichéd and crass, while the cast is largely terrible. Yet everything has an undoubted vibrancy about it. The substance might be nonsense but the cinematic style – brisk editing, good camera movement, a solid Alan Silvestri score – pulls you through. For instance, there are a number of well-constructed shots. The first scene in the police station features a 64-second long take. The camera passes the busy front desk, the detectives’ bullpen and every 1980s-Hollywood-cop-shop stereotype going (yes, there are prostitutes!) before finding Harrigan, who we then follow into his boss’s office. It’s just one of a few instances where a camera move is artful and revealing. They deserve better material. The first half of the movie also really pushes a film-noir feeling – most evident in a penthouse crime scene and Harrigan’s office with light coming in through blinds – and there are flashes of Robocop-style satire when we see clips from a lurid TV news show. However, halfway in, once the plotting stops and the film becomes an extended chase scene, it gets really boring. It doesn’t help that Glover has to keep talking to himself because the sidekicks have all been dispatched. That device worked in Die Hard, but Harrigan is no John McClane. There’s only one reason why it’s worth watching until the end. The predator’s spaceship, where the climax takes place, is *great*. Vaguely Mayan or Aztec-looking, it’s both beautiful and strange at the same time. (By the way, the production designer was Lawrence G Paull, whose work keeps getting praised on this blog. He was also responsible for the physical style of Back to the Future and Blade Runner. In short, he’s a genius.) Predator 2 ain’t subtle, but it is quite fun. A guilty pleasure.

Seven ugly motherfuckers out of 10

Next time: Even more Aliens…

Predator (1987, John McTiernan)

Spoiler warning: these reviews reveal plot twists.

A crack team of commandos are sent into the jungle to rescue a captured diplomat. But they encounter a ruthless alien, who starts to pick them off for sport…

The cast: As a film-obsessed child I had an enormous man-crush on Arnold Schwarzenegger; or rather the films he made. Here he plays Major Alan ‘Dutch’ Schaefer, the cigar-chomping leader of the special-forces team. Because it’s an 80s Arnie flick Dutch has a couple of James Bond-style puns, but they don’t fit the film’s tone at all. It’s not one of Arnie’s best performances. Much better is former Rocky star Carl Weathers as George Dillon: the only character with any kind of complexity, he lies to the others then realises he’s fucked up. The rest of the team are played by Bill Duke (decent), Jesse Ventura (barely an actor), Sonny Landham (who was such a fruit-loop the producers insisted on a minder to keep him in check), Richard Chaves and Shane Black. Black is an interesting piece of casting. He’s a really good screenwriter (Lethal Weapon, The Last Boy Scout, Last Action Hero, Iron Man 3 and others) and was given the minor role of Hawkins so he could be on set to do any last-minute rewrites. Given that he’s not an actor, he’s actually okay. Hawkins’s character trait is that he tells bad jokes. Incidentally, two of the cast feature in other 1980s Schwarzenegger films: Duke had been in 1985’s Commando; Ventura was in 1987’s The Running Man. Jean-Claude Van Damme was originally cast as the predator, but looked weedy next to Schwarzenegger, Weathers and the others so was replaced by seven-foot-two Kevin Peter Hall. Elpidia Carrillo plays Anna Gonsalves, an underwritten woman the team rescue from the bad guys. At the end of the film there’s a credits sequence where the actors smile at camera in time with their names appearing. I’m going to assume that the idea was stolen from Hi-De-Hi.

The best bit: The most successful aspects of the film are the visual effects used for the predator’s POV shots and for when it’s ‘cloaked’. The former is a thermal-vision image where heat shows up against the blurry background, while the latter has the creature only visible as a see-through shimmer.

Crossover: Watching the Predator and Alien movies at the same time is an idea based on the later films featuring both monsters. However, the two series share a connection at this point too. Unhappy with the original creature design, McTiernan hired visual-effects guru Stan Winston to come up with a new predator. Winston doodled his initial ideas while on a flight with his friend James Cameron, who’d just directed Aliens. Glancing at the drawing, Cameron suggested that Winston add mandibles – hence the predator’s distinctive multi-jaw face, which in no way reminds me of a vagina.

Review: There’s a scene about halfway through where the characters know the predator is nearby so all fire their guns into the jungle. Despite a deafening hail of bullets, they hit nothing but foliage. Director John McTiernan has said that this was a joke on his part. A satire of brainless, gung-ho action films. The characters have all this hardware, he chuckles on the DVD commentary, yet are ultimately impotent. Well, he’s being extremely disingenuous. Earlier in the film, an attack on a terrorist compound is staged and shot like a music video. There’s a pornographic excitement about guns, bullets, deaths, muscle-bound men and explosions. The notion that any irony is on show is funny in itself. (Admittedly, the film does have some spoofy moments: surely it’s a joke when Dillon’s arm is ripped off but keeps firing the gun it’s holding.) The bad guys in that compound, by the way, are from some unspecified Central American country and are barely seen let alone fleshed out. They’re just A-Team villains, there to be killed by the untouchable heroes in slow motion. God, I sound like an old fart moaning about violence. I actually love action films and have no problem with violent stories. But there has to be more class to them than this. This movie doesn’t seem too concerned with plot or characterisation. The only woman in the story, for example, is an embarrassment. Anna Gonsalves has no dialogue in English until nearly an hour in, does nothing but provide exposition, then is absent from the climax. In its favour, the film can be seen as some kind of Apocalypse Now in reverse. The characters’ journey ‘upriver’ only takes up the first half-hour of the story – it’s then about them trying to escape. On that level, the story works well and is tense and exciting. It takes the predator a while to show up, but it’s clear he’s not just a mindless killer. For him, this is a game. The film then becomes obsessed with the rituals of hunting. The predator refuses to attack the unarmed Anna; Bill Duke’s Eliot superstitiously scrapes his bald head with a razor; Dutch has slashes of camouflage make-up that make him look like some kind of New Romantic tribal leader, then in the final act he improvises a series of traps. Not as smart as it thinks it is, but still enjoyable enough hokum.

Seven pussies out of 10

Next time: The predator takes LA…

See here for a Redux review, which takes a specific look at Predator’s lead actor…