BIRD BOX (US - 2018) Directed by Susanne Bier. Written by Eric Heisserer. Cast: Sandra Bullock, Trevante Rhodes, John Malkovich, Sarah Paulson, Jacki Weaver, Rosa Salazar, Daniele Macdonald, Lil Rel Howery, Tom Hollander, Colson Baker, BD Wong, Pruitt Taylor Vince, Vivien Lyra Blair, Julian Edwards, Parminder Nagra, Rebecca Pidgeon, Amy Gumenick, Taylor Handley, David Dastmalchian, Happy Anderson. (R, 124 mins) Based on a 2014 novel by Josh Malerman, the frontman for Detroit indie rockers The High Strung, the Netflix Original film BIRD BOX has an intriguing concept that was probably conveyed more effectively on the page than on the screen, where its ideas come off as tired riffs on the overly familiar. Comparisons to this year's earlier A QUIET PLACE are inevitable, and there's also some of PONTYPOOL and the apocalyptic horror feel of THE WALKING DEAD, but it mostly plays like a less preachy retread of M. Night Shyamalan's little-loved THE HAPPENING, which seems an unlikely choice for any film to emulate, especially a decade later and with no apparent sense of revisionist affection on the horizon. Jumping back and forth between the present day and five years earlier, BIRD BOX takes time to piece its story together but you'll ahead of the game all the way, predicting all of its punches and reveals long before they're apparent to its characters. It opens with Malorie (Sandra Bullock, who also produced) coldly and methodically blindfolding two children, named "Boy" (Julian Edwards) and "Girl" (Vivien Lyra Blair), and loading them, some supplies, and three birds in a box into a small boat for an arduous journey along a dangerous river. She dons a blindfold herself and warns them to not speak or remove the blindfolds no matter what they hear.
Cut to five years ago, as a strange mass suicide phenomenon stemming from Russia and Eastern Europe makes its way to the US: people stopping dead in their tracks, their eyes changing color, and impulsively killing themselves by the quickest means at their disposal, spurred on by voices that only they can hear, often those of friends and family encouraging their actions. The force's presence is indicated by increased wind gusts and sensed by birds. Malorie, a single, misanthropic artist who's pregnant and largely in denial about it, is in an SUV with her sister Shannon (Sarah Paulson) when the "virus" breaks out. Shannon is behind the wheel and overtaken by the force, loses control, gets out and, as if under some kind of mind control, wanders directly into the path of a speeding truck. In the ensuing panic and chaos, a woman (Rebecca Pidgeon) walks out of a house to rescue Malorie but is herself "taken over," answering to her unseen mother and self-immolating by getting into a car already engulfed in flames. Malorie is taken into the house, whose kind-hearted owner Greg (BD Wong) has turned into a shelter for his neighbors and uninfected passersby, among them the woman's abrasive husband Douglas (John Malkovich), who's already no fan of Malorie since his wife died trying to rescue her, ex-military Tom (Trevante Rhodes), Cheryl (Jacki Weaver), Charlie (Lil Rel Howery), Lucy (Rosa Salazar), and Felix (Colson Baker, better known as rapper Machine Gun Kelly).
BIRD BOX continues to cut back and forth between the post-outbreak of five years earlier and Malorie, Boy, and Girl's journey on the river, presumably to some known area of safety while pre-spoiling who doesn't make it. Screenwriter Eric Heisserer (ARRIVAL) and Danish director Susanne Bier, making her first film since the long-shelved and barely-released 2015 Bradley Cooper/Jennifer Lawrence bomb SERENA, do manage to convey a nerve-wracking intensity in the early outbreak scenes and in the bits where the survivors go out for food and supplies blindfolded, forced to feel their way around and at the mercy of voices constantly badgering them to "look." But the more the film goes on, the more predictable and silly it becomes. They let another pregnant woman, Olympia (Danielle Macdonald), in the house against Douglas' wishes, but when odd, twitchy Gary (Tom Hollander) shows up, it should be immediately apparent that he's bad news, which only Douglas--BIRD BOX's de facto Harry Cooper--seems to pick up on. Things really start collapsing around the time Malorie and Olympia go into labor at the same time. When the backstory is told and the third act goes forward with the river journey, the film turns into an eye-rolling metaphor for...I don't know...motherhood, I guess? Malorie is distant, unlikable, and often cruel to Boy and Girl, so much so that they're five years old and don't even have names. It's eye-rollingly ludicrous when she has her Come to Jesus moment as "it" surrounds them but is held at bay when Malorie defiantly declares "Leave my children alone!" That's even before a Shyamalanian reveal and the absurd reappearance of a minor character who only seems to exist to give a nod of affirmation that, yes, Malorie is indeed a good mother. BIRD BOX has an effective score by always-reliable team of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (the closing credits theme really gets its John Carpenter groove on), and it benefits from an ensemble of fine actors--and Machine Gun Kelly--doing what they do. Bullock and Paulson display a terrific and very natural sibling chemistry until Paulson's early and abrupt exit, Howery is essentially playing the same comic relief exposition guy he perfected in GET OUT, and Malkovich is cast radically against type as "John Malkovich." But it doesn't offer much in the way of originality, and seems specifically designed to be a horror movie for people who don't watch horror movies and therefore won't recognize just how many ideas it's recycling.
THE PREDATOR (US - 2018) Directed by Shane Black. Written by Fred Dekker and Shane Black. Cast: Boyd Holbrook, Trevante Rhodes, Jacob Tremblay, Keegan-Michael Key, Olivia Munn, Sterling K. Brown, Thomas Jane, Alfie Allen, Augusto Aguilera, Jake Busey, Yvonne Strahovski, Brian Prince, Mike Dopud, Lochlyn Munro, Garry Chalk, Duncan Fraser, Francoise Yip. (R, 107 mins) 1987's classic PREDATOR hasn't had a lot of luck with sequels. 1990's PREDATOR 2 has its fans but it's always felt like a script for a post-LETHAL WEAPON/DIE HARD Joel Silver project that had the Predator shoehorned into it, and 2010's PREDATORS (headlined by action icons Adrien Brody and Topher Grace) was instantly and justly forgotten (and if we're counting offshoots, there's 2004's terrible ALIEN VS. PREDATOR and 2007's improved ALIENS VS. PREDATOR: REQUIEM, which isn't a great movie but I'm reasonably certain I'm the only person who didn't hate it). When it was announced that veteran screenwriter (LETHAL WEAPON, THE LAST BOY SCOUT, and THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT) and smartass auteur (KISS KISS, BANG BANG and THE NICE GUYS) Shane Black had a PREDATOR project in the works, hopes were high for what came to be rather unimaginatively titled THE PREDATOR. Principal photography wrapped well over a year ago, with a planned March 2018 release, but 20th Century Fox delayed it due to poor test screenings. Black was ordered to scrap the entire third act, with reshoots taking place in March, followed by another delay with still more reshoots being done in July, just two months before the new release date. The reshoots were extensive enough that a character played by Edward James Olmos ended up being eliminated completely, but even going in without that knowledge, you'll be able to spot the exact moment that THE PREDATOR stops being a Shane Black film and starts being a rushed, compromised franchise product with the requisite bush-league CGI (the CGI in the new finale is really bad and doesn't even look finished, because it probably isn't). At least when his buddy Robert Downey Jr got him his IRON MAN 3 comeback gig, Black was still able to make the film he wanted to make.
It's a shame because for about 2/3 of the way, THE PREDATOR is a blast, and a distinctly "Shane Black" throwback to the kinds of '80s and '90s action movies we don't see much of anymore. Co-written with Black's old buddy Fred Dekker (they wrote 1987's Dekker-directed cult classic THE MONSTER SQUAD), it's pretty much a feature-length trigger warning: it's profane and vulgar, filled with quippy banter, tasteless jokes with sexist and/or racially insensitive punchlines ("What's the difference between a joke and five black guys? Your mother can't take a joke"), politically incorrect insults ("Hey, Twitchy," one guy says to another with Tourette's), an autistic kid dropping F-bombs, gratuitous gore, graphic decapitations and disembowelings, and a callous, wanton disregard for human life. It's got everything that was great about big action movies of the era of the original PREDATOR (itself a troubled shoot that really didn't come together until very late in production), and of course, it's neutered by the reliance on focus groups and an unnecessary concern with setting up a new franchise. One can't really judge Black's original third act until we see it, presumably on the Blu-ray bonus features, but there's no denying that what's here doesn't really work either. But the first 2/3 is ridiculously enjoyable, filled with typically quotable Black dialogue, some inspired callbacks to earlier PREDATOR films ("Lawrence Gordon Middle School," Jake Busey as the son of his dad Gary's doomed PREDATOR 2 character, someone spotting a bunch of motorcycles and yelling "Get to the choppers!"), and some hilarious sight gags, sometimes buried in the background, sometimes front and center, including one involving a severed arm that had the entire audience rolling.
Military sniper Quinn McKenna (LOGAN's Boyd Holbrook) is on a covert mission to take out members of a Mexican drug cartel when the operation is botched by the appearance of spacecraft that crash lands in the jungle. A camouflaged Predator slaughters the rest of his team, but McKenna, realizing he's made contact with an alien life form, manages to get away with its protective helmet and arm gear and mails it to a PO box back home. The box ends up on the doorstep of McKenna's estranged wife Emily (Yvonne Strahovski), where their autistic, genius son Rory (ROOM's Jacob Tremblay) figures out how it operates, inadvertently sending a signal revealing its location to another, larger Predator (this one featuring a modified design that looks more like a Rastafarian Rawhead Rex), with two dreadlocked Predator tracking dogs (an interesting addition) in pursuit. Meanwhile, McKenna is being railroaded by his military superiors and a black-ops government outfit run by the snarling Traeger (a gum-and-scenery-chewing Sterling K. Brown of THIS IS US) and dumped on a military prison transport to keep quiet. Traeger's goons grab biologist Dr. Casey Bracket (Olivia Munn) and take her to a secret installation where the crash-landing Predator is being kept under sedation. Of course, it escapes, and, with Traeger and dueling Predators in pursuit of young Rory, she eventually teams up with McKenna and "The Loonies," a Dirty Half-Dozen group of military malcontents who've taken over the prison transport: Nebraska Williams (MOONLIGHT's Trevante Rhodes), who shot his commanding officer because "he was an asshole;" joke-cracking troublemaker Coyle (Keegan-Michael Key); chatty Jesus freak Nettles (Augusta Aguilera); British card trickster Lynch (Alfie Allen); and Baxley (Thomas Jane), whose Tourette's leads to his blurting things like "F-f-f-fuck me in the face with an a-a-a-a-aardvark!" and "Eat your pussy!" the moment he makes eye contact with Bracket.
With the kind of one-liners that recall Bruce Willis barking "She's so fat, I had to roll her in flour and look for the wet spot" in THE LAST BOY SCOUT and its over-the-top splatter, THE PREDATOR wears its hard-R status with beaming pride, and those looking for something that's as much a PREDATOR sequel as it is a Shane Black joint won't be disappointed...for a while, at least. However, it's hard to imagine anyone being really satisfied with either of the film's endings, whether it's a shoddy-looking greenscreen battle atop a spaceship or an awkward, tension-deflating coda (complete with Holbrook's hair being a completely different color than it was in the rest of the movie) that seems more suited for a post-credits stinger that should've been cut. THE PREDATOR does a good job of juggling its many characters until the final act, when the film loses Black's style and becomes another rote, quick-cut blur of action and explosions that's completely at odds with the late '80s/early '90s aesthetic that dominated the preceding 75 or so minutes. Whether it's sloppy editing or a disgruntled Black reshaping the ending of the film with a gun pointed at his head, the film loses the thread, loses track of some its characters, and starts collapsing in the home stretch. Despite this, THE PREDATOR is 2/3 of a really fun movie with affectionate nods to PREDATOR and PREDATOR 2 (love that Alan Silvestri cue), and the bygone days of 30 years ago that feel akin to something an in-his-prime Joe Dante would've made if he was a misanthropic, sarcastic wiseass. In the end, the best comparison to make with this film is that it's the EXORCIST III of the PREDATOR franchise, a film where studio-mandated, third-act reshoots done by the director under duress are completely at odds with the tone and style of the rest of the movie, yet enough of its creator's voice remains in the first 2/3 that it's still worthwhile. Now that we've seen William Peter Blatty's intended ending of EXORCIST III, it's easy to see why the studio intervened. The end result is not a washout by any means, but time will tell if we ever get to see Black's initial cut of THE PREDATOR. As it is now and as a whole, it's a mild recommendation, but with some caveats.
