The Predator: A bloody good time

The Predator (2018) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rated R, for strong bloody violence, gore, relentless profanity and vulgar sexual references
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 9.14.18

Revived sci-fi action franchises have done pretty well lately.

Chris Pratt and a fresh team breathed welcome new life into the Jurassic Park series, and now director/co-scripter Shane Black has done the same with an updated Predator. He and co-writer Fred Dekker acknowledge the 1987 original, while cleverly welding their story to a can’t-miss formula that hearkens back to 1967’s The Dirty Dozen.

When a captured Predator regains consciousness and realizes that it's about to become a
laboratory experiment, it reacts with understandable fury. (Unfortunately, our heroes
won't get their act together for several more scenes.)

The result is 107 minutes of skillfully paced suspense, divided into distinct “chapters” that involve audience-pleasing characters, all played well by an ensemble cast that blends familiar faces with several newcomers. The dialogue is sharp, the action frequently laden with droll banter: no surprise, coming from the guy (Black) who made his mark with 1987’s Lethal Weapon and, more recently, ensured that Iron Man 3 was far better than its sophomore-slump predecessor.

Too bad Black undercuts all this good stuff by making his new Predator so unrelentingly gory. 

We’re talking splatter-porn levels of abattoir grue more appropriate to trashy zombie flicks. Black signals such sensitivities right out of the gate, when an early human victim — suspended upside-down from a tall tree limb, as befits Predator custom — is sliced in half, after which the camera lingers needlessly on his entrails, as they slowly drip and slide to the ground below.

Seriously?

That’s merely the beginning. Black and Dekker gleefully succumb to all manner of slicing, dicing, severed limbs, eviscerations, disembowelments, decapitations and more, often depicted via grody-to-the-max close-ups. I fully appreciate that a Predator entry must be violent, but there’s such a thing as too much … particularly when such excess damages an otherwise shrewdly assembled thrill ride.

That aside, there’s no denying that Black hits the sweet spot that blends macabre humor, fast-paced thrills and edge-of-the-seat suspense.

The film opens with a space battle between two small fighters; the targeted ship escapes and crash-lands on Earth, right where retired Special Forces army ranger-turned-mercenary Quinn McKenna (Boyd Holbrook) is leading a clandestine op against some Mexican drug cartel baddies. He alone survives the subsequent assault by the ferocious whatzit that emerges from the craft; better yet, McKenna escapes with the alien’s helmet and weapon-laden armband.

Suspecting a potentially hostile de-briefing back in the States, McKenna ships the alien tech home, where it unintentionally winds up in the hands of his adolescent son, Rory (Jacob Tremblay, well remembered from Room). He’s a spectrum child, on the border of autistic, and also — thanks to Tremblay’s gifted performance — one of the film’s strongest assets.

Due to Rory’s insatiable curiosity and savant-like talent for pattern recognition and puzzle-solving, he begins to figure out how this strange stuff functions.

Mortdecai: Fool's gold

Mortdecai (2015) • View trailer 
Three stars. Rated R, and needless, for fleeting profanity and mild blue humor
By Derrick Bang

I’ve a soft spot for light-hearted caper flicks, and a corresponding tendency to treat them gently, during post-mortem analysis.

It’s therefore with great regret that I pronounce Mortdecai a crushing disappointment.

Intending to rig the art auction on which their fortunes now depend, Mortdecai (Johnny Depp)
and his wife, Johanna (Gwyneth Paltrow) make a public appearance to allay suspicion.
But will the hapless Mortdecai be able to orchestrate his end of this complex swindle?

Although promoted as a caper saga, that’s not quite accurate; the closest our title character gets to a heist is climbing a ladder to enter a second-story window. And while the story does revolve around a rumored Goya masterpiece enhanced by the possibility that its canvas has been defaced with a code that might lead to long-lost Nazi gold, Eric Aronson’s script dwells too heavily on Mortdecai himself.

Preening, foppish, self-centered Charlie Mortdecai, played in full-blown, upper-class-twit mode by Johnny Depp.

Time was, a new Johnny Depp project was cause for celebration; he brought such panache to most everything he did a decade or so ago, in projects as diverse as Chocolat, From Hell, Finding Neverland and even the first Pirates of the Caribbean. More recently, though, his work has tended toward self-indulgent laziness, with Depp apparently coasting on the merits of his own career, and bringing little to each new party.

These days, in the wake of The Rum Diary, Dark Shadows and most particularly The Lone Ranger, we’re more inclined to roll our eyes at the prospect of a new Depp feature ... much the way his Mortdecai sighs theatrically and rolls his eyes at just about everything here.

That’s the major problem with director David Koepp’s approach; he and cinematographer Florian Hoffmeister focus far too much on Depp. Granted, one expects a movie’s star to receive the lion’s share of close-ups, but Depp’s slow, aristocratically condescending line readings — although initially droll — become tiresome, and eventually bring the otherwise fast-paced film to a grinding halt. Every. Time. He. Speaks.

Koepp is trying for a manic, effervescent blend of P.G. Wodehouse and The Pink Panther: a smart choice, since this film is inspired by the charismatic, forever cash-strapped, art-dealer anti-hero in a series of three comic novels by the late British author Kyril Bonfiglioli, and published back in the 1970s. His Mortdecai clearly is based on Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster, and the resemblance is cemented further by Mortdecai’s far more capable manservant Jock Strapp, an equally obvious nod to Bertie’s Jeeves.

Bonfiglioli’s Mortdecai books are beloved by no less than Stephen Fry, who will be remembered as the pluperfect Jeeves in the 1990 TV series he did with frequent colleague Hugh Laurie. And if this film’s press notes are to be believed, Depp himself is another Bonfiglioli fan. So far, so good.