my plans to just chain combo predator movies sort of fell apart after i realized i donât really have the time to spend many hours a day watching alien warriors hunt the most dangerous game, but i did finally get around to watching predator 2.
iâve seen part 1 like uncountable times, but it had been several years since the last time, so rewatching it my main thought was âoh, i guess i remember more of this movie than i thought i did?â
predator 2 iâve seen like one time total, and i have no idea when that was. i in fact may not have actually seen the full film ever? anyway, it is both better and worse than my impressions of it led me to believe.
worse in that it definitely has the feel of a movie without a perfectionist director at the helm (unlike part 1). a lot of the dialogue is muffled, and bill paxtonâs performance especially is super uneven. i feel like he could have done a great job with the character because its right up his alley, but uhh i suppose i could say they did not use his best takes in the final cut.
although, weirdly, this is something it has in common with the first one now that i think of it. the predator 1 script has a lot of good one liners in it, both comedic and just sort of⌠character stuff (thanks shane black, and, presumably, cocaine), but the way they are performed and the way the film is shot seems to be constantly undercutting them. in that movie it gives it, charitably, kind of an understated tone that i think actually works pretty well (at the expense of better defined characters). in p2 a lot of the dialogue just seems rushed or muffled in ways that seem decidedly less intentional. idk maybe it just needs to be remastered or whatever. but in both movies this is kind of compounded by the gimmick where you see/hear stuff through predator vision, which distorts the audio even more. strange choice.
anyway, i had completely forgotten how much of the movie really seems like verhoeven-light stuff. itâs set in a near-future 1997, and thereâs a lot of very early 90s hand-wringing about gang violence and sensationalistic media (morton downey jr had a second career as a character actor basically thanks to filmmakers all wanting to tell the same joke about sleazy journalists/trash tv hosts). only, unlike verhoeven, itâs never really clear who exactly is being satirized here. there is a potential for a much more darkly comedic angle on the same premise, that makes a lot more of the idea that the predator comes to los angeles in search of the most dangerous killers to hunt, and ends up focusing on taking out a bunch of cops. that would be a cool movie. but in this one he seems mostly interested in comedically violent gang members, and the cops he kills seem to be mostly incidental/plot necessity.
there is one really cool visual gag in the movie, and its the very first shot. i bet this one is in the script and when they came up with it they partied super hard afterward. it opens with a helicopter shot of a lush forest, very reminiscent of all of the dense foliage in the first movie (my favorite part of that movie, see above), with a bunch of percussion over the score that makes it feel like youâre in some exotic jungle. but then the helicopter flies over the ridge, to show the la skyline over the horizon, revealing that the forest is (i think) griffith park. itâs pretty bad ass. the power of cinema, baby.
danny glover is pretty cool in this. he whispers almost every line and furrows his brow constantly. i feel like heâs really giving his all towards portraying a totally burned out cop in the midst of a literal war, the only problem is the movie wants him to also be even more of a schwarzenegger hero cop caricature than schwarzenegger himself is in the first one. all of the renegade cop stuff in this is pretty ridiculous, like itâs just boilerplate âhe plays by his own rules⌠his superiors donât respect his insubordination, but he gets the job done⌠through excessive force, mostlyâ stuff. i mean, i guess the point is that he has to be the ultimate warrior, but it seems sort of clear to me that glover was most interested in the idea that this is a guy who is totally mentally and physically exhausted by the responsibilities of his job, and surrounded by idiots who donât take it seriously even though people are dying all around them.
ok, so the other bad parts are the weird racism/xenophobia (jamaican gangsters??? in los angeles??? could have actually been interesting in a movie where they were able to see them as anything other than cartoon characters), and the fact that the (literally) ballbusting âone of the guysâ woman cop just disappears from the movie completely once it is revealed that she is pregnant. like, she just never shows up again.
gary busey is pretty great though. i feel like they must have let him improvise some of his lines because theres lots of unnecessary adjectives in there.
oh yeah, the last thing i wanted to say about this movie is danny gloverâs more sympathetic co character, who i think might actually be named billy pilgrim in the movie, looked real familiar to me. so i looked him up and realized itâs none other than kent mccord, of jack webbâs post-dragnet late 60âs/early 70âs cop show Adam-12. i used to watch reruns of that show all the time, i have a weird soft spot for it even though it is just like the most obvious reactionary copaganda imaginable. like the entire premise is just two beat cops driving around, being clean cut honorable working class men.
i think the reason i like it is because every episode is like a weird shaggy dog storyâi think they must have been committed to showing âwhat itâs really likeâ for cops out there. so there will be an A plot that involves some kind of typical cop show Big Time crime melodrama and action, but then a bunch of other little subplots about weirder more innocuous shit. so they go from having these intense shootouts with bandits to like arresting drugged out hippies and helping old ladies find their purses and stuff. at the time i was watching a ton of this show i still had really great ambitious to be a screenwriter/filmmaker, and one of my brilliant plans was to do an Adam-12 reboot but in the style of Robert Altman/PT Anderson, with just like a twinge of satire/subversiveness to undercut the pro-cop stance of the original show. Like it wouldnât have to be a parody like the Aykroyd dragnet movie, more just like an entire film of John C Reillyâs character from Magnolia (who Iâm pretty sure must have been at least partially inspired by Adam-12 in the first place).
thereâs just something really funny to me about the premise of two straight laced aw-shucks type beat cops dropped into the world of early 1970âs los angeles. i think this must have been funny to jack webb et al too, but while he probably saw them as like beacons of light in a declining era, itâs more funny to think of them as just like totally unprepared to deal with the complexity of the world they are living in. but because they are basically nice guys they try to be understanding, and only gradually become aware of the fact that the biggest problem in their city is the institution they work for. i dunno. maybe itâs not that good an idea. but i mean imagine like Inherent Vice or Once Upon a Time in Hollywood except the main characters are a pair of dopey perpetually optimistic cops played by like matt damon and nicholas hoult (who looks kind of like kent mccord did back in the day).
anyway, predator 2 is a pretty cool movie, the predator absolutely destroys a bunch of guys
