"Some damn fool accused you of being the best."

Rating: 6/10 (1 October 2000)

WARNING: REVIEW CONTAINS MILD SPOILERS
You're guilty of it, I'm guilty of it, we're all guilty of it. In what now seems aeons ago, we were all to blame for encouraging Schwarzenegger. We laughed at his bad acting and indecipherable accent, and even, in the 90s, let him think he was in on the joke. Of course, we drew the line at Last Action Hero (shame, I quite liked that one, but never mind...), yet Arnhuld had had a decent run of mindless action movies that, despite ourselves, we genuinely enjoyed.
Nowadays, it's a mistake, a relic, like filofaxes or a digital watch. Most sane people are embarrassed to admit they ever watched an "Arnie" movie, Terminator excepted, much less enjoyed one. Predator is no different. Surprisingly, it wasn't one of the movies that Arnie did a sequel for, as it was his first big hit, earning considerably more than the Conan projects or the first Terminator. It saw him pushed up towards what now seems inconceivable superstardom, and is a typical macho tirade. A plotless pastiche of the Vietnam conflict, only with a seven-foot semi-transparent, green-blooded alien, it has characters that greet each other with an arm wrestle, call each other "son of a bitch" as a friendly nickname, and say things like "I ain't got time to bleed."
Two things stick in my mind about this movie: one is that I was once naive enough to not really understand the "big as a house" joke and repeated it to my embarrassed mother; the other is that I couldn't tolerate more than fifteen minutes of it, so grating was it's dumb-as-you-like, testosterone-propelled dialogue. Seen in full, it's perhaps not that bad for throwaway entertainment, though I dispute Empire's recent claim that it's formula action trappings were supposed to be satirical of the genre.
In Apocalypse Now a fleet of helicopters flew into the jungle to the overblown strain of Wagner's "Ride of the Valkrie". Here they do it to the jazzy-pop combo of Little Richard's "Long Tall Sally". In a bizarre sort of way, this is actually classier. The film saw the continuation of the "jokes" that Arnhuld woodenly tells, the "jokes" we used to convince ourselves we found funny. He gets five one-liners here: "stick around"; "knock, knock"; "oh, s**t"; "you're one ugly motherf****r" and "bad idea". As you can see, with first-rate material like that, its no wonder two writers were needed. (Intriguingly, one of the writers goes by the name of "John Thomas". No wonder all the characters are lead by their ...)
The platoon are originally on a mission to rescue hostages. Of course, this being Arnie, he blows up the entire military camp, including the hostages they were supposed to be freeing; though this particular plot point is glossed over. Probably because it is a plot point, and plot isn't the governing factor here. Anyway, it soon turns out the men have another enemy in the guise of an infrared alien, and are gradually picked off one by one. While this obeys the basic tenets of horror, don't be fooled into thinking this is scary. Any chance of fear is vanquished by fairly standard direction and the artillery-lead pace. It's hard to be frightened when you've got huge guns and can blow down trees.
Predator, more than the majority of Schwarzenegger's CV, still stands up as an okay-ish, no-brain shoot-em-'up. It doesn't have any real ambition or meaning, it just goes through ammo and a pedestrian storyline until the predictable outcome is met. At least we got a Schwarz who hadn't yet developed enough of an ego to object to being covered in mud. Though even if he had allowed his head to be shaved ten years later for Batman and Robin, would it have made a difference? A reasonable excursion though as Apollo Creed himself says to Arnie: "You got no style."