31 years after its original release, it's hard to believe that there was once a time when John McTiernan's Predator wasn't revered as one of the best action movies of the modern era. Critics savaged the film, although now even the stuffiest of critics cannot deny its shamelessly muscly, bullet-spraying, blood-spattering charm. Predator is now held in as equally high regard as McTiernan's other action classic Die Hard - released the following year - and featured Arnold Schwarzenegger at the very top of his game. This was long before the Austrian hulk made a swerve into politics and became the self-parody he is today. The premise is almost offensively simple, but the execution makes this one of the most effortlessly enjoyable action movies of the 1980s. McTiernan knows exactly how to tear a jungle apart with gunfire, and set up his disposable supporting characters for a grisly death.
Special Forces major Dutch Schaefer (Schwarzenegger) is "choppahed" into South America, where is he given a mission to rescue an official who has fallen into the hands of some insurgents. Schaefer and his team - played by Bill Duke, Jesse Ventura, Sonny Landham, Richard Chaves and Shane Black - are met by Schaefer's old Army buddy Dillon (Carl Weathers), and the two greet each other in the most 80s way possible by flexing their oiled and oversized muscles in a manly handshake. As the team venture further into the jungle, it becomes clear that Dillon isn't telling the whole story, and the mission becomes even more difficult when they capture a female hostage named Anna (Elpidia Carrillo). Yet this is far from their biggest problem, as on their tail is an alien with the ability to camouflage itself and see with thermal imaging, backed by an arsenal of powerful extra-terrestrial gadgets and a healthy appetite for the hunt. With the group being picked off one by one by this formidable enemy, Schaefer must get to the extraction point before he becomes another skull in the beast's growing collection of trophies.
The plot can be compared to countless B-movies throughout the years, but what worked for Alien also works for Predator. Take a simple premise, add some budget, bind it together with some good old-fashioned decent film-making, and the result is a timeless classic. Yes, the special effects have dated and most of the actors' stars have somewhat dimmed in the decades since, but Predator is even more of a blast now than it was when I stole my brother's VHS twenty-odd years ago. The sequels, spin-offs and comic-books have gone to great length to explain and develop the Predator's mythology, but McTiernan simply lets the monster do its thing. Played by the 7 ft 2 in Kevin Peter Hall, the Predator's formidable armour, weaponry, stealth and sheer repulsiveness has made it a sci-fi/horror icon. Like the Alien franchise, subsequent movies have felt the need to explain the creature's backstory, damaging their otherworldly mystery in the process, but Predator simply throws him into the mix and lets him loose on our world's finest warriors. With star Shane Black's reboot The Predator set to arrive shortly, now is the perfect time to revisit what drew audiences to the series in the first place, in spite of how your attitude may have soured after those terrible Alien cross-overs and the forgettable third entry from 2010.
A quasi-disturbing trend in '80's American cinema was the wisecrack; innocuous in some genres, it even extended to the horror film, with the child killer (paedophile if you want a 21st century tag) Freddy Krueger - who would flaunt his quips after extravagantly offing a "youngun". Within the action film, it was Schwarzenegger who was the king of the one-liners. The Running Man offered the perfect vehicle for this fashion of dialogue, with its structure of death-for-survival. In the future (2017 to be precise) the worlds economy has crashed leaving many homeless, and the state runs the entertainment industry - in this science fiction world, television ratings are raised by the depiction of violence and humiliation; as long as it is justified with criminality.
Ben Richards (Schwarzenegger) is an ex-cop, wrongfully imprisoned for a helicopter attack on civilians. In the opening scene we see the "real" event, as Richards refuses to shoot innocents, and ignores orders. As we are in familiar sci-fi themes, this dystopic police state, and its control of the media, manipulates the facts to create a criminal. Escaping a maximum security prison (which seems surprisingly easy to break out of), Richards heads for his brothers in the city, whilst Laughlin (Yaphet Kotto) and Weiss (Marvin J. McIntyre) head for revolutionary activity. But the butcher of Bakersfield (the name attributed to Richards by the falsified media story) is too buff, and far too athletic to not be used in television most popular gameshow (its title used for this film), and Killian (Richard Dawson) spots the potential of this "contestant" in a prison break video.
Captured and forced to take part in The Running Man, Richards (along with Laughlin and Weiss and the ubiquitous damsel (Maria Conchita Alonso) who is picked up along the way) has to face a series of stalkers, who hunt them down in a fight to the death. Simply put, it is a kind of underground gladiatorial entertainment, and with the over the top stalkers (including Fireball (Jim Brown) and Buzzsaw (Gus Rethwisch), who all have specific modes of weaponry) they face a game-like structure to get to the next level. In this structure we find the linguistic genius (sic) of Schwarzenegger, as he sardonically "explains" within one comedic line, what happened when he killed another man (for example, after raising buzzsaw's chainsaw to his groin, he is asked what happened to him, and Richards replies "He had to split" - hilarity!
Some of the films themes resonate within our popular culture to this day. Now, I'm in no way stating that this film was prescient, or even that it was ahead of its time. The presentation is certainly of its time, and many of the ideas can be found elsewhere (within literature, Orwell's 1984 is standard for dystopian futures), such as Peter Watkins' Punishment Park (1971). What the film does highlight when viewed in another century is that the general populous has become far more media savvy that ever. We are used to the idea that anything we watch on television (particularly when we consider the mass of reality TV that litters our airwaves) we are watching something edited for the purpose of entertainment. In The Running Man, the audiences are unaware that manipulation is rampant within both current affairs and entertainment broadcasting.
I think I may have just taken a Schwarzenegger film far too seriously. This is an '80's gung-ho action film, that perpetuates the throw-away, comic book violence that prevailed - after all, America was defeated in their last war (Vietnam) and, I'm guessing, had to make war and violence accessible to children! This frightening concept would become more concerning when many adult action ideas were transferred to Saturday morning cartoons (both Robocop and Rambo were translated to cartoon, and they were based on two of the most violent films of the decade). This digression is not too far away from The Running Man, as it does often feel like it is directed at a younger audience, despite the bloody violence, it is very much a cartoonish and immature approach to what could have been a more cerebral comment on mass entertainment.
Based on a book by Stephen King (Writing as Richard Bachmann), the film does have some interesting elements to it. In our modern world of multi-channel, on-demand entertainment, a large segment (the majority in fact) of the media we consume, is so insipid, so incredibly dumbed-down, that it would be easy to argue that these forms of visual pleasure are produced as a form of control (you know, keep them in line by feeding them shit that rots the brain). In The Running Man, the largely homeless population gather round the over sized screens that litter the skyline to watch state-controlled gameshows, and they find their entertainment in the death of others. When Richards begins to beat the stalkers, the audience start gunning for the supposed "villain". Therefore, the film seems to be making the point that death is what people want to see, even if it is the wrong type of death.
Despite all of these transgressions, this was one of the favourites as a youngster. It is undeniably entertaining, and has some genuinely nice moments, and offers some interesting visions of a future that was inevitably there in 1987, but in which has been exacerbated over the last 30 years of increasingly dumb entertainment. Within standard television production modes, The Running Man is not inspiring film making (it was directed by Paul Michael Glaser, who was Starsky in Starsky and Hutch, and also directed many episodes of Miami Vice). There is probably no doubt that this will be remade, as the ideas and themes are still very relevant today, but lets hope that if it is remade, they forget about the muscles and gladiator iconography, and focus on the manipulation through entertainment. And please, never, ever put Schwarzenegger in a Lycra jumpsuit!
Special Forces major Dutch Schaefer (Schwarzenegger) is "choppahed" into South America, where is he given a mission to rescue an official who has fallen into the hands of some insurgents. Schaefer and his team - played by Bill Duke, Jesse Ventura, Sonny Landham, Richard Chaves and Shane Black - are met by Schaefer's old Army buddy Dillon (Carl Weathers), and the two greet each other in the most 80s way possible by flexing their oiled and oversized muscles in a manly handshake. As the team venture further into the jungle, it becomes clear that Dillon isn't telling the whole story, and the mission becomes even more difficult when they capture a female hostage named Anna (Elpidia Carrillo). Yet this is far from their biggest problem, as on their tail is an alien with the ability to camouflage itself and see with thermal imaging, backed by an arsenal of powerful extra-terrestrial gadgets and a healthy appetite for the hunt. With the group being picked off one by one by this formidable enemy, Schaefer must get to the extraction point before he becomes another skull in the beast's growing collection of trophies.
