The original Predator may have had the most future Governers ever in one movie (California’s Arnold Schwarzenegger and Minnesota’s Jesse Ventura), but 2010’s Predators has the most Oscar winners. Lead Adrien Brody won both of the times he was nominated for Best Actor, first for 2002’s The Pianist and then for 2024’s The Brutalist. Mahershala Ali also won both times he was nominated for Best Supporting Actor, first for 2017’s Moonlight and then again in 2019 for Green Book. Fallout and The White Lotus‘ Walton Goggins, meanwhile, produced and starred in 2001’s winner of the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film, The Accountant.
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The clout doesn’t even stop with Oscar wins, as Laurence Fishburne was nominated for Best Actor for his work in the Tina Turner biopic What’s Love Got to Do with It. Not to mention, all of the aforementioned stars have had roles in any number of other, not mentioned, Oscar darlings. Alice Braga for instnace had a role in City of God while Topher Grace showed up in Traffic, Interstellar, and BlacKkKlansman. So just how did a movie about fighting mandible-adorned Yautja get all of these high-caliber performers to walk through a danger-ridden space jungle?
What Makes Predators a More-Than-Worthy Entry in the Canon?
While Predator 2 is fun and liked by some, it’s still a far cry from John McTiernan’s original, both in terms of tone and level of quality. Predators isn’t on par with McTiernan’s film, either, but it comes closer. And, as for the tone, it’s very much a natural continuation. Of course, the film is at its core about soldiers fighting to stay alive while facing a mysterious threat that is capable of outgunning and outsmarting them. But Predators does a few novel things to help it stand apart from the Schwarzenegger-led classic.
For one, there’s the opening, which has Brody’s ex-U.S. Special Operations Forces veteran Royce falling through what seems to be Earth’s atmosphere. He finds that others have just experienced the same, and after they get done pointing their guns at one another and screaming, they come to realize they’re all very different but, outside of one, share a certain similarity…they’re all killers. Not only that, but most of them are also soldiers well-versed in combat, with any number of kills and close calls under their respective belts.
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Yet, they all come from different corners of the Earth. While Royce fights for the United States, Braga’s Isabelle fights for the Israel Defense Forces, Oleg Taktarov’s Nikolai for Russia, Danny Trejo’s Cuchillo for the Los Zetas Mexican drug cartel, Louis Ozawa Changchien’s Hanzo for the Yakuza, and Ali’s Mombasa for the Revolutionary United Front in Sierra Leone. The only outliers are Goggins’ Stans, a death row inmate scheduled for imminent execution, and Grace’s Edwin, a doctor who seems fully out of place.
They learn that, not only are they not on Earth, they’re on an alien game preserve, and they’re the game. They’ve been carefully selected. It’s a neat twist on several fronts. There’s certainly an appeal to the original film’s team, which had camaraderie and rapport, but making the team a melting pot only serves to heighten an already-present tension. Toss in the third-act twist about Edwin being a serial killer and Predators manage to function as its own entry while still carrying the appealing elements of the original film’s DNA.
Even still, it’s not a perfect film. Even given the diversity element, most of the characters come across as fairly bland. And, in the case of Trejo, Ali, and Fishburne’s (who plays Noland, a U.S. Army Air Cavalry soldier who has lived on the planet through 10 years’ worth of hunting cycles), underutilized. Not to mention, unexpected castings can pan out quite well, as was the case with Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight, but Adrien Brody essentially stepping into the shoes of Arnold Schwarzenegger?
It wasn’t until Dan Trachtenberg’s Prey that the original Predator got a continuation (or, rather, chronological predecessor) that truly rivaled its masterful handling on the action genre, but Predators is nonetheless a blast, and a far sight better than 2018’s butchered-behind-the-scenes The Predator.
