Predator

Well, it turns out work was in fact canceled for a third straight day today after all. And as much as I like the five-day staycation, I've got to admit, I'm really getting bored over here. There's only so much cleaning and tidying and chore-doing a man can do on a surprise day off, and here on my third consecutive one, I'm just running out of things to do. And while I'd never complain about a chance to bite into the backlog a bit, I have to admit, I'm a bit worn out on just about every front at the moment; I watched three full seasons of television in the past eight or nine days. I beat my last DS game, bought a new one, and have played that one for a few hours, too. I went to chip away at an Xbox 360 game only to find my system red-ringed. I played a Wii game for a few hours before growing too bored to continue. On the book front, I'm about a hundred pages deep into three separate books and generally saving those for bedtime and plane rides. The only place I had to turn to, then, was my dwindling movie backlog.

So I watched Predator, the most Halloween-appropriate movie I've got left in the backlog. I bought it two years ago with the intention of saving it for some sort of "man night" in which a bunch of dudes would hang out on an otherwise boring night and play cards and watch Predator or something. Such a night hasn't materialized in the past two years, and it's easy to see why; my closest friends have all kind of dispersed geographically over the past two years, to the point where whenever we do have the chance to get together, we want to do something better with our time than watch shitty 1897 action movies. C'est la vie!

I had seen bits and pieces of Predator before, but never the whole thing start-to-finish until today. And I've gotta say that I was underwhelmed. I wasn't expecting an incredible piece of filmmaking or anything, but I had at least hoped for something more exciting. For the most part, this was just Arnold, Carl Weathers, and Jesse Ventura quietly creeping around in the jungle simultaneously hunting and being hunted by the Predator. I think the movie and the titular antagonist have maintained popularity over the years because of their premise more than because of this movie's execution. An alien who can use active camouflage while hunting men with thermal sensors? That's a legitimately frightening monster. But if you search the Internet for initial reactions to Predator, you'll actually find a whole lot of non-plussed critics. Metacritic has the average film rating at a 36, which is pretty damn bad, and I can't even disagree with most of the sentiments. The movie picks up a bit toward the end, but not in a way that changed my overall opinion.

Hey, they can't all be winners. At least I've finished off the oldest movie in my backlog once again. The new claimant to that title? It's a tie between American History X and 25th Hour. Edward Norton, everybody!