Margarita Movies

Girls are welcome at Margarita Movie, in most cases. Sometimes, however, you just need to bro the fuck out. As such, all ladies that were in danger of attending were carefully managed and manipulated with expert skill so we could man the fuck up in a grunting mass of boozed-up testosterone. And plus, to be honest they probably didn’t fancy this film much anyway.

FUCK YES. Team MM has been hyped for Predators since we first heard of it. The first Predator is one of the greatest action films of all time, featuring non-stop action, fucking burly men firing guns at things, a big alien monster, and an undercurrent of homoeroticism. Also, there’s one female cast member and she exists to be 1. In peril and 2. Treacherous. Talk about fucking awesome. If Team MM had been reviewing films back when Predator came out we would have lost our fucking minds. Sadly, I was 7. 

I should mention that I got pretty drunk for this film. I quickly realised that I was drunker than I should be, and so nothing but SHEER WILLPOWER kept me clear and appreciative for the first hour of this film. If it was Airbender I’d have been asleep.

The film starts in mid-air, as the cast are thrown at an alien fucking planet. They get parachutes, but even so that’s a pretty manly opening. The cast are a gang of murdering ruffians, essentially a generic gang of bad-asses. You’ve got Danny Trejo, A black guy, an Asian guy, a Russian guy, Shane from The Shield, Venom, and a girl. They’re all lead by Adrien Brody, who has sidestepped his not particularly masculine filmography by bulking the fuck up and becoming quite a convincing special forces mercenary.

The cast wanders about a bit trying to work out where on Earth they have been stranded, but as they get to the top of a hill and discover that the entire sky is actually a 70s airbrushed sci-fi book cover painting of a bunch of floaty planets and stuff. 

As you might expect, these dangerous killers are at each others’ throats for a good portion of the film. Shane from The Shield is constantly at odds with Black Guy, presumably because he has to be a racist with that accent. I actually saw Shane from The Shield in a bar in Hollywood a month or so ago, it was fucking exciting.

Once we’ve established that every ass that is on screen is 100% bad, it’s time for some action. If you thought this film was just going to take Predator and re-enact it without adding in anything new, you were dead wrong, because the cast is quickly assaulted by some alien dog things. The Dogators have a go at the cast until they are called off by a Predator’s Alien Space Whistle so the cast can panic a bit.

Just in case anyone hadn’t grasped the premise of this film, Adrien Brody has worked it all out. He’s used clear deductive reasoning to establish that the planet is a game reserve, and they’re the game. He’s fucking clever! And handily, The Girl has seen the first Predator film, so she explains that to the rest of the cast.

At this point Danny Trejo dies horribly. This is a bit of a shame because Danny Trejo is kind of awesome. Still, we press on. After a bit more cast death, we encounter Morpheus from The Matrix, who was part of last season’s crop of deadly human bad-asses who were being hunted to death by bastard alien Predators. He’s actually a bit unhinged from all the time on this shitty alien planet being hunted to death, so it’s clear from the get-go that he’s going to have to die horribly too.

I very nearly passed out here, but they sort of do a pan over this Predator camp to show what they’re up to. I passed out for a brief second, and then shook myself back into alertness to see a sneaky cameo of an Alien (like, a xenomorph, from Alien/Aliens, not an alien that is a Predator - fuck this is confusing, since they’re both aliens and they’re both predators) skull in a fire. NERD BONER!

This is the most ridiculous/awesome bit in the film, but at one point, Asian Guy finds a samurai sword knocking about on this planet. He admires it in a way that lets us know that he definitely knows how to use a sword, but because he’s Asian we assumed that anyway. So the cast is getting chased through a grassy field by a Predator, and Asian Guy sort of turns to the rest of the cast and nods, and any man could tell you, that nod is Man Code for “I am going to have a samurai sword fight to the death now, catch you guys later”. There’s really not much reason for him to sacrifice himself other than that samurai sword fights with aliens are PRETTY awesome. Apparently this whole bit is a loving Kurosawa homage but I didn’t get it. I tried to watch Seven Samurai once but it was kind of boring. They should remake it, in colour. And maybe instead of samurai they could be cowboys. This idea TM and (C) Nick Locking 2010.

WARNING: SPOILERS IN THE NEXT PARAGRAPH INCLUDING THE OBLIGATORY *TWIST*!

Morpheus gets shot so hard by a Predator he FUCKING EXPLODES. Shane from The Shield has a valiant go at a Predator with his shitty little knife but sadly gets his skull and spine FUCKING RIPPED OUT. At this point the only cast members left are Adrien Brody, Venom and The Girl. It’s clear to anyone that their best bet is to make friends with the Predator that looks the most like the one from the first film and team up to fuck up the nasty 2010 model Predators. They do that, there is some awesome fighting, but then it turns out - Venom is only a bloody serial killer! This is awesome. He starts cutting up The Girl but luckily Adrien Brody turns up in the nick of time and kills the fuck out of him.

They try and get on the Predator spaceship but unfortunately it FUCKING EXPLODES. This leaves Adrien Brody and The Girl left alive at the end, in a totally artful homage to the original Predator, where Arnie and The Girl survive to the end. There are many Clever Parallels of this nature in the film that I would mock a lot more mercilessly if there hadn’t been so many awesome killings in this film.

She said the jungle came alive and took The SCALE Scale:

S - Story: ROCK FUCKING SOLID. If you want complexity and subtext, go see a film with girls in it, you disgusting weakling. 8.

C - Comedy: There is, admittedly, not much comedy in this film, although Morpheus exploding does make me smile a little. 3.

A - Awesomeness: Considering the normal kind of film we see at Margarita Movie, this is an easy TEN MOTHERFUCKING POINTS. 10.

L - Ladies: No film can be perfect, and the nature of Predators means that it can’t really score very highly here. However, The Girl is actually pretty tasty for a grim Israeli special forces type, and googling Alice Braga will reveal that they grimmed her up significantly for the role and she is actually quite a pretty lady. 6.

E - Et Cetera: How many more films in the Predator/Alien franchise are we going to see in our lifetime? Not many. And they will probably suck as hard as the Aliens Vs. Predator films. I think we should be thankful that we have a Predator film that is not only watchable, but pretty cool. 8.

-Nick