The original Predator is remembered by many as a true action classic. It’s simple but engaging story of a group of mercenaries sent into the jungle under false pretenses and then abandoned to die at the hands of an unseen and seemingly unstoppable alien hunter was enough to hook audiences and make for a massively entertaining film that continues to be popular twenty-three years on. It didn’t matter that the characters were barely developed beyond one-dimensional archetypes: they were tough and they didn’t take any shit. What else do you need, really?

The newest entry in the Predator franchise, the blandly-titled Predators, delivers almost the same exact things as the original: a group of badasses lost in a jungle and surrounded by unseen foes trying to pick them off. The new sequel hits many of the same plot points as it’s predecessor - to the point that sometimes one has to wonder if they weren’t just using excerpts from the original screenplay. And yet, unlike it’s predecessor, it utterly fails to engage and barely entertains. Indeed, Predators is one of the most boring action films in recent memory.

The problem lies in the only thing a movie like this has to make you care: the characters. Again, the original Predator was no great shakes at developing characters; it had a cast of one-dimensional toughs. But they at least had your sympathy once they, and you, realized that they had been betrayed by their superiors. The higher-ups promised the grunts a rescue mission and instead sent them into a death trap. The new cast of heroes in Predators have no reason to be where they are in the first place. The film opens with the characters literally just falling out of the sky and landing in the middle of a predator hunting ground. Since they all awoke from comas during their freefall, none of them knows how they got here and beyond a few throw-away lines, they never really question it much. I think you know you’re in trouble when the film opens with a Deus Ex Machina.

Forget about that though. Here’s a bigger problem: no one will give a damn about these people. The cast of Predators is as generic as the cast of a little boy’s action figure battles on the living room floor. The film establishes everyone in a scene where our main figure, Royce, looks around the group and says “he’s a secret agent, and he’s an inmate, and she’s an assassin and he’s a yakuza and he’s a doctor and he’s a druglord and he’s a Serb” and yadda yadda yadda. Expository dialogue doesn’t get any worse. If these people had any shred of a backstory we might be able to care when they face death, but they don’t, at least not until a couple of desperate third-act throwaways immediately preceding a couple of kills. It doesn’t get much blander than “I have kids!”.

The actors certainly don’t make up for the deficiencies of their parts. As pack leader Royce, Adrien Brody spends the film doing his best Clint Eastwood whisper, which is horrible, and staring into space blankly in ways that, I guess, are meant to seem stoic but which actually seem to convey vapidity. Or that he’s reading the cue card. Alice Braga, an actress I’ve honestly never heard of before, plays Isabelle, a mercenary of some sort who doesn’t like Royce or his willingness to let everyone else die to keep himself alive. And yet she just keeps following him around. Braga isn’t terrible, but she’s far from dynamic and all she really has going for her is that she looks hot toting a big-ass gun; otherwise, she is utterly forgettable despite having more screentime than almost anyone else. Topher Grace wins himself the WTF Miscasting Award for even being in this movie at all, let alone playing a character who lives all the way to the third act. He does, at least, play the wimp, a doctor who seems to be out of place next to all the monstrous killers he’s teamed up with. Grace showed some promise with his turn in Traffic, but a decade later he seems to have lost whatever he had. He might be a hit comedic actor on TV but he fizzles as a dramatist on the silver screen.

The presence of Danny Trejo as a hardened Mexican drug lord is the one glimmer of hope in Predators, as Trejo delivers his usual great performance as an outright badass who takes no prisoners. Of course, he’s the first one to die, and hope dies with him. Danny Trejo seems to die early on a lot lately (see Rob Zombie’s Halloween for another fine example. Well, don’t actually see it…). I hope he doesn’t get offed in the first act of Machete as some sort of twist. Finally, we come to Laurence Fishburne. Fishburne seems to be entering the Brando phase of his career, and when I say that I mean the late-life, fat and talentless Brando of films such as Don Juan Demarco and The Island of Dr. Moreau. Fishburne turns up in Predators as a portly, heavy-breathing, tired and utterly disinterested shell of himself. Imagine if his teenager from Apocalypse Now had become a Col. Kurtz type after thirty years in the jungle and that’s pretty much who Cowboy Carl is playing here. Fishburne’s Noland is a survivor of previous hunts who stole some Predator armor to hide among them and steal their food and other supplies and who has gone totally crazy in the meantime. By the time Fishburne is done wheezing like a man on life support, talking to his imaginary friend and dressing like a desert sheik for reasons unexplained, there’s barely any shred of his dignity left.

Anyway: the plot, such as it is. After falling out of the sky, our heroes wander the jungles and, eventually, come to a clearing where they can see the sky and the four moons hanging there. Obviously, they are no longer on Earth, and I can accept that anyone would recognize that instantly. Royce, apparently psychic, divines almost immediately that this planet is a game reserve reigned over by advanced hunters. I don’t know if I’d make that leap so quickly, but then again I didn’t have cue cards in front of me telling me what to say and do the way Adrien Brody appears to throughout most of this film. Of course, Royce is correct: this world is a hunting ground for the Predators, those ugly alien gamesmen who seem to enjoy hunting humans even though we keep killing them in the end. I’d say the most dangerous game isn’t worth it, but then again Predators might just be really stupid. Like the movie Predators.

Stupid or not, the Predators have certainly gotten lazy. Whereas they used to hunt humans on our own home field, they now transport us straight to them so they don’t have to fly their ships through space. They also no longer work alone. Not only does Predators show the hunters working in a pack, it also introduces Predator hunting dogs, large saber-tooth tiger-like creatures designed to flush the humans out. These dogs are perhaps the worst new conceit this film adds to the Predator mythology: not only do they look stupid, they also make the Predators themselves seem more like human quail hunters, taking away some of their alien mystery. They’re also the biggest waste of time. The very first time the dogs show up they get absolutely slaughtered by the humans, as all it takes to kill them is a couple of bullets. One even spontaneously combusts (?) when hit. Why would you send such weaklings into battle at all?

The one truly interesting twist to the plot is the discovery that there are actually two species of Predators, and that they are engaged in a sort-of race war. At one point, Adrien Brody even saves one of the lower-caste Predators and convinces it to team up to take out the higher-up ones. That could be cool, but the film squanders this opportunity by only introducing it in the last act and immediately launching it into the climactic battle where the good Predator dies and Brody has to step up and defeat the enemy in almost the exact same way Arnold Schwarzenegger did in the original movie. It also doesn’t help that the higher-level Predators have giant comical Jay Leno chins like the Predators in Alien vs. Predator. I was trying to forget that movie.

The Quick and Dirty: Predators copies the worst parts of the original movie and none of the good parts. Lame casting and writing cripple what could have been, at the very least, a fun and brainless action movie. It’s better than the AVP films, but not my much. Only the most diehard fans of the series need bother. Predators gets a 1 out of 5.