Do you measure The Predator against cinema as a whole, or do you measure it by the modest achievements of the franchise so far? It’s an interesting philosophical question, given that of the previous five films to feature the man-hunting, mandible-sporting aliens, only John McTiernan’s 1987 original could be called great, while every other iteration of the series runs the gamut from fun-but-flawed (Predator 2, Predators), to holy-god-what-were-you-thinking (Alien Vs Predator:Requiem). Which is the key to enjoying The Predator, Shane Black’s sequel and hopeful franchise re-starter: it’s not a great movie per se, but it’s a pretty enjoyable Predator flick.
And that’s because it’s a B movie, and it knows it. Black (and yes, he was Hawkins in the original, lest we forget) and his co-writer, Fred Dekker (Night of the Creeps, House) have sharply defined B movie sensibilities, having both come up at a time when the drive-in fodder of the ’70s was turning into the tentpole blockbusters of the ’80s (see Black’s own screenwriting breakthrough, Lethal Weapon). That trend has continued and these days pulp-as-mainstream is the default, but even in these heady times where superhero films are taken seriously and people actually argue about the potential merits of a Masters of the Universe movie “where they get it right”, The Predator may take it a step too far for most audiences.
Which is a damn shame, because if you’re open to the film’s throw-everything-against-the-wall charms, it’s a hoot. This is a film that pits a brain-damaged Dirty Half-Dozen against alien killing machines, after all, with everyone (well, chiefly Keegan-Michael Key) rattling off Black’s trademark filthy testosto-zingers in between the gunfire, explosions and viscera.
To get there takes a few ungainly plot machinations and tonal shifts, though. After special forces sniper Quinn McKenna (Boyd Holbrook of Logan) has a run-in with a Predator and his whole squad is minced, he’s packed off to the funny farm, but not before he manages to mail off some Predator technology that, for reasons that don’t need going into at this juncture, wind up in the hands of his young, autistic son (Jacob Tremblay). When an even bigger, badder Predator drops out of the sky to recover the missing gadgets, Quinn has a busload of fellow damaged military veterans, including the aforementioned Keegan, former Punisher Thomas Jane, Game of Thrones dickputee Alfie Allen, and Moonlight‘s Trevante Rhodes, to call upon in the fight to save his kid and estranged wife (Aussie actress Yvonne Strahovski, a long way from Gilead here).
There’s a bit more to it, including Sterling K. Brown showing up to complicate matters as a shady government agent ala Gary Busey in Predator 2 (Jake “son of Gary” Busey has a brief cameo), but that’s basically your lot: The A-Team’s stunt doubles vs ferocious extra-terrestrial big game hunters in Spielbergian suburbia.
Which sounds great, but when you’re operating at this particular pitch of drive-in insanity, you pretty much have to include some bad ideas, which in this case involve some nonsense about the Predators harvesting their prey species’ DNA, and a big ol’ sequel hook that will never, ever, be acted upon – The Predator is all but destined to be derided and ignored on first release, and adored a decade or two down the track. Why? Because Thomas Jane’s character has Tourette’s, someone’s legs get sliced off by a force field, and there are Predator hunting dogs, one of which becomes the movie’s cute pooch. Those aren’t bugs though – they’re features. Like the pickle on a good cheeseburger, they exist to add piquancy. Perfection is boring.
If it sounds messy and slipshod, it is. Whether that’s by design or through last minute panicked editing is hard to say, although word is that some serious retooling went down right up to the release date. If that’s the case, we would love to get a look at whatever insanity Black and Dekker originally intended – if this is The Predator with the weirder angles sanded down, the prototype must be mind-blowing.
Perhaps the irony is that, for a film designed to resurrect a 21 year old franchise, The Predator feels about 30 years out of date. If it actually were a relic of the late ’80s sci-fi actioner direct-to-video boom, it’d be regarded as an absolute cult classic – a trait it shares with the recent and rather wonderful Beyond Skyline. If you have an affection for that kind of thing, run to The Predator – it has the fix you need. If you don’t, a matinee of The Book Club is no doubt playing somewhere nearby.
Sydney, 1959. While she waits to see if her exam results will open a pathway to university study, bright teen Lisa (Angourie Rice) takes a Christmas job as a sales assistant at the luxurious Goodes department store. There she is taken under the wing of the vivacious Magda (Julia Ormond), a post-WWII immigrant from Slovenia who runs the store’s haute couture department.
Magda is a figure of mystery and a little suspicion to the other “ladies in black” who work the women’s fashion floor, including Patty (Alison McGirr), who is struggling to reach her taciturn, emotionally cut-off husband, and Fay (Rachael Taylor), who is looking for love but disillusioned by the quality of men she attracts. However, to Lisa, Magda is a guiding hand, introducing her to a world of fashion and sophistication that seems a far cry from the more prosaic world inhabited by her working class parents (Shane Jacobson and Susie Porter, perfect).
Adapted from Madeleine St John’s 1993 novel The Women in Black, Ladies in Black is a bright, brisk, optimistic coming of age tale that dexterously brings to life a mosaic picture of a city on the brink of modernity. The deft script by director Bruce Beresford and producer Sue Milliken touches lightly on a whole swathe of themes and issues – women in the workforce, the right to education, the immigrant experience, sexual liberation – but never dwells on any one, and never lets the potential heaviness of any given topic drag the proceedings down.
In effect, this means that the various dramatic arcs in play are fairly flat parabolas. Nobody really faces any particularly challenging hurdles on their journey to a happy ending, and that’s the only kind of ending the film is interested in (but we do take in a happy beginning and a happy middle on our way there). However, that doesn’t mean that the film is bereft of tension. Rather, that tension exists on a metatextual level because this is a) an Australian film b) about women c) set in the ’50s, so we’re always waiting for the other shoe to drop. Will Lisa’s old man forbid her from pursuing a university degree? Will Patty’s husband turn abusive? Will Rachael’s immigrant love interest, Rudi (Ryan Corr, charming as hell) be revealed as a war criminal (a bit of a stretch, but there’s a line of dialogue that hints at the possibility)?
Catharsis comes when the resolutely romantic and upbeat Ladies in Black refuses to wander down potentially dark paths, instead delivering a buoyant, upbeat, cinematic treat precisely crafted by Beresford and his team. It’s not so much a journey to be taken as an experience to luxuriate in, taking in the detailed period setting, vibrant camera work, gorgeous fashions, and winning, charismatic performances.
It’s the latter that really carries the day. Ladies in Black is populated with characters you want to spend time with, from Rice’s spirited ingenue to McGirr’s loving but frustrated wife, to Jacobson’s simple but big-hearted working dad to Noni Hazelhurst’s near-cameo as the ladies’ supervisor who, with Nicholas Hammond’s store manager, functions as a kind of Greek chorus for the action. British actress Ormond gets the showiest role as Magda, all world-weary continental charm and wry sophistication, but it’s Rachael Taylor who is the stand out, giving a luminous performance as the vulnerable Fay that is like something straight out of a Golden Age of Hollywood classic melodrama. If there’s any justice in the world, it’ll be regarded as a star-making turn that puts Taylor firmly on the A-list.
The men are sidelined a little but that’s to be expected and besides, performers the calibre of Corr and French actor Vincent Perez, who plays Magda’s husband Stefan, are smart enough to know their job here is to accentuate the women at the centre of the film, bringing colour and character but never overshadowing the real stars.
There’s a chance that Ladies in Black won’t sit well with some viewers who mistake lightness for simplicity, but this is a thematically complex film not in spite of its bubbly surface, but because of and in tandem with it. Its strength is that it proves that important themes can be addressed at a higher register; not everything has to be a dirge. Ironically for a film so squarely focused on the experience of women, the one term that best fits Ladies in Black is “masterful.”
Years after he gave away playing in the Hundred Acre Wood, Christopher Robin (Ewan McGregor) is a harried businessman in post-World War II London, under the pump at work and regretfully neglectful of his adoring wife (Hayley Atwell) and cherubic daughter (Bronte Carmichael). Given the choice between a family weekend in the country and working all weekend at the behest of his stuffy, entitled boss (Mark Gatiss, perfectly cast), Christopher chooses the latter. It’s rather perfect timing, then, for his childhood imaginary (or is he?) friend Winnie the Pooh (Jim Cummings) to re-enter his life, dragging him away on an adventure to find Piglet (Nick Mohammed), Eeyore (Brad Garrett), Rabbit (Peter Capaldi) and the rest of the gang, who have been missing since Christopher grew up.
If you can imagine a boring and even more obviously manipulative version of Hook filtered through the self-importance of Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are, you’ve got a fair idea of what Disney’s Christopher Robin tastes like. This is what happens when someone at Disney sees Paul King’s wonderful Paddington films, panics, and rushes something into production that can compete in the same cultural space, tapping Marc Forster, whose credits include the superficially similar Finding Neverland, to head up the project (Tellingly, a live action Winnie the Pooh project was announced in 2015 – a year after the first Paddington charmed all comers).
The result is a bizarre chimera of a film, by turns twee, self-serious, often depressing, and – occasionally, mind you – charming, but not as charming as it thinks it is. The whole thing feels like the product of a thousand bad decisions, which is frustrating because the more obvious choice is always easily found by turning 180 degrees. Starting with a long, grey, downbeat prelude in which Christopher Robin abandons his childhood friends and drifts into anonymous adulthood? Wrong choice – you’ve just lost the kids in the audience. Descending into an awkward and unearned farcical chase sequence for the climax? Wrong choice – you’ve just lost the adults. Dropping in a frankly frightening sequence wherein it’s implied that Pooh has been sleeping in a misty netherworld version of the Hundred Acre Woods for decades waiting, Cthulhu-like, to be called once more into being? Wrong choice – this is no place for existential horror.
Everyone does their best to keep the wheels turning, but it’s a thankless task for stalwarts like McGregor and Atwell, who mug as hard as they can. Atwell in particular is ill-used, but then perhaps she’s better off than poor Ewan, who gets the bulk of the screen time and is clearly uncomfortable acting opposite the film’s menagerie of CGI creatures (Post-Jar Jar Stress Disorder, perhaps?).
The non-human characters fare better – it is never not delightful to hear Jim Cummings as Pooh and Tigger, and whoever cast doleful Brad Garrett as Eeyore deserves a raise. But that’s about the kindest thing you can say about the whole shebang.
Christopher Robin feels like a rush job – a cynical attempt to latch onto a tone and a form that has proven successful elsewhere, but with no understanding of how and why it has worked before. If we’re going to compare Paddington again – and really, Christopher Robin invites us to – those films, like the best children’s fiction, work because although they appear simple, they are immaculately, precisely constructed works of imagination, with every element carefully considered and moving in concert to produce a sense of wonder and joy. Christopher Robin can’t even decide on the “reality” of its cast of moth-eaten toys and woodland creatures in the context of its own narrative. It asks us to give ourselves over to it, but offers no reason to do so. Instead we get the usual platitudes about staying young on the inside, the importance of family over work, play instead of duty – which are all fine ideals up to a point, but have been better and more agreeably presented in older, better films. Here, all that comes packaged in a dull and insipid story – which is an ironic and damning indictment. For a film about toys coming to life, Christopher Robin is surprisingly lifeless.
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