'Ten Little Indians' in the Jungle!

Rating: 9/10 (26 December 2012)

This film is to me a guilty pleasure for all time. It is a classic so well camouflaged in a mix of genres, i.e., War Movie, Sci-Fi, Horror, Murder Mystery, to name a few, that it doesn't even know its a classic! This even grants the film a certain amount of humility concerning its intentions. It is an action flick with the apparent gravitas of a Sgt. Rock comic book, that upon repeated viewings inspires some truly deep thinking. It's the little action adventure movie that didn't think it could and didn't even bother trying to do anything beyond entertaining its audience that somehow lumbers beyond the limitations of genre expectations to serve up food for thought as well as grist for the gore mill. It is a film I could have easily seen Joe Kubert or Jack Kirby doing the storyboards for that is peopled with musclemen who blindly wrestle their way into an end zone of unexpected deliverance. 'Predator' rocks with enough visceral thrills for any 'action junkie' and yet is deeply satisfying intellectually in this gruff, offhand Hemingwayesque way. It made me nod with the slowly dawning realization of having finished a well-sanded project in wood shop.
'Predator' is an essay on machoism in all its most laudable and cartoonish aspects and that is what makes it such satisfying storytelling. The very beginning of the movie looks like a few seconds of some unknown Sci-Fi flick spliced onto the beginning of a standard Vietnam War movie dedicated to exploits of martial valor. It almost feels like a glitch in editing, as though somebody grabbed the wrong reel. Arnold Schwarzenegger swaggers out of a landed helicopter chomping a cigar backed by a team of ace commandos. You expect Chuck Norris to arrive at any moment. He meets with Carl Weathers, also chomping a cigar, and after some playful arm wrestling as a way of saying 'Hello', then gets down to being briefed about the mission at hand.
Schwarzenegger eventually finds out that Weathers has him employing his team and combat tactics under false pretenses and that the mission has different objectives from those stated by Weathers. What Weathers doesn't know is that his 'mission' is about to be preempted for the sporting pleasure of a visitor from another world. After that, it's the hunt and the chase and the fight against an unseen adversary who at times seems everywhere and yet nowhere. The beauty of this film is watching the macho postures of the various lead characters slowly deconstruct and dissolve into expressions of alarm and dread or simply screams of terror and agony when it's their turn to have their ticket punched.
When Schwarzenegger finally gets some idea of what's killing off his team one member at a time, he becomes an archetypal hero that Natty Bumpo or James Fenimore Cooper would be proud to welcome into the fold. This is the film 'Conan the Barbarian' should have been, but never could be. It is about the past, present and future of manly virtue or machismo, but only as a disturbing afterthought.