3. Predators
Where The Franchise Went Wrong Teaming up with the Aliens.
How It Re-Succeeded Going back to basics and getting rid of the Aliens. The Predator is an awesome monster. I'll make that plain now. It's effectively a dreadlocked killing machine capable of great menace, an athletic bogeyman allowing the film's heroes to be action-heavy tough guys, rather than the shrinking violets and everymen of the regular slasher genre. The first film played this to perfection, stuffed with Arnold Schwarzenegger, inventive murder and latent homoeroticism like only an 80s film can be. The second Danny Glover-fronted film was something of a noble misfire, possessing a cool Predator-in-the-city premise but ultimately failing to deliver, despite its grand ambitions. However, it was when the Predator began to team up with the Alien franchise and Paul W. Anderson that things got nutty. Namely, the whole thing just veered off at the deep end, taking what made the franchise brilliant the heroically awesome monsters and their wanton badassery and bastardising it in a couple of substandard flicks concerning an underground pyramid and the abomination that was the Predalien. Any novelty of seeing the two franchise monsters together on the silver screen was soon lost under the constant repetition and awful effects, and we just wanted it to stop. So thank god for Predators. Taking the franchise back to basics, it eschewed the overly-extraterrestrial environments and cityscapes of its unwanted predecessors for the jungle-based combat of the original, and had a fantastic time doing it. Much like the original, the whole thing was just a B-Movie excuse for violence made all the more charming by the fact it was so blatant. Predators just stuck a couple of hardened psychos, badasses and Topher Grace in their home jungle, and began to hunt them. Again, no hassle, just violence. The weird thing was that the cast was almost too good for a a film like this, anchored by a 'roided-up Adrien Brody, the reliable Alice Braga and Laurence Fishburne giving good nutter. Coupled with some insights into hierarchical Predator society and a flair for bitching action set-pieces, the enterprise was able to be more than the sum of its parts, putting itself back in the Predator tradition. Personally, I really hope they follow through on the hinted-at sequel, although I'm not hopeful.