For the week of August 6th, John McTiernan's iconic action-horror Predator is getting a 4K remaster, although it's just one component of the larger 4K Predator Trilogy set. If you're anything like me, you're more interested in the multi-pack than the standalone: I prefer the Predator adventures in reverse order of their original release dates. McTiernan's original is still phenomenally entertaining - minus the first Terminator, Predator might be the best of Arnold Schwarzenegger's '80s output. It's got the goriest action (sorry, Conan), the best roster of supporting characters, and the still-stunning monster effects from the late, great Stan Winston. However, I've always felt a curious lack of tension watching Predator, and I blame Schwarzenegger. As charming as he is, you're never worried for his safety against the Predator. Arnold spent the whole of the 1980s affirming his fundamental indestructibility, and Predator never challenges that principle. It's part of the reason I slightly prefer Predator 2. New director Stephen Hopkins isn't as virtuosic a shooter as McTiernan, but there's something irresistible about the Predator abandoning a claustrophobic jungle battleground for the sprawling urban nightmare that was 1990s Los Angeles. Plus, new hero Danny Glover comes across, like he does in the Lethal Weapon series, as winningly human. Unlike Schwarzenegger, Glover has to scrape by on his pluck and intellect, and even then, we feel like the Predator could beat him. Predator 2 also doesn't get enough credit for crafting just as colorful side characters as its predecessor, with Bill Paxton's charmingly scuzzy cop and Gary Busey's douchebag Predator expert first among equals. In fact, Nimród Antal's underrated 2010 thriller Predators is my favorite for just that reason. Yes, we get more Predators (although not as many as you're expecting - this is still a relatively low-budget picture), but we also get juicy turns from *deep breath* Lawrence Fishburne, Topher Grace, Oleg Taktarov, Louis Ozawa Changchien, Danny Trejo, the great Walton Goggins (who steals the picture so easily you never see him sweat), and Academy Award winners Mahershala Ali and Adrien Brody, all of whom play reprobates and criminals brought to a Predator hunting preserve in outer space. How these folks band together (or don't, in some telling cases) to stop the brutal Predators proves consistently thrilling - it's practically a Howard Hawks movie in space!
From Warner Home Entertainment comes the animated adventure The Death of Superman. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that Warner and DC Animated are rebooting the iconic "Superman Dies!" storyline. It's one of the flagship arcs in the DC Universe; to DCA's credit, this animated version is certainly more satisfying than the bungling-of-same that happens in Superman: Doomsday and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. Screenwriter Peter J. Tomasi has a good ear for Superman (Jerry O'Connell) and the other Justice League members (Nathan Fillion's Green Lantern and Chris Gorham's Flash walk away with the movie), and he actually improves on the original run in some areas. I love how Tomasi works Lex Luthor (a surprisingly good Rainn Wilson) into Doomsday's story, and he finds an efficient way to make Hank Henshaw (Patrick Fabian) an integral part of this narrative BEFORE the return of the Supermen section. Plus, Bibbo Bibbowski is one of my favorite side characters in the Superman world, but he'd be the first person you'd cut from an adaptation, yet Tomasi finds room for the big lug (Charles Halford). So what's the problem? Simple - if Snyder's version looked great but was narratively inert, directors Sam Liu and James Tucker have produced a diverting yarn that's visually on par with an okay children's cartoon. The animation is flat, generic: basically my default complaint about these DCA movies. I'd gone into this one with higher hopes - the recent Batman Ninja is a consistent aesthetic delight - only to find the same wan character animations and detail-free backgrounds. And Superman himself looks the worst! We're meant to sympathize with both his struggle and his eventual demise, and it's hard to connect with the Man of Steel when he looks like an unfinished rendering. Furthermore, the filmmakers can't improve on the comic's biggest shortcoming: Doomsday himself. Doomsday is interesting only because he kills Superman. Nothing about his design or behavior engages us beyond thinking, "Huh. He seems pissed." Even in the comics, the character is functional. So is this movie.
Far more bracing is the ferocious thriller Revenge. At first glance, Revenge seems no different from a hundred other genre features. Dig it: Matilda Lutz's coquettish heroine has just been sexually assaulted, and after fleeing her attackers (Vincent Colombe, Guillaume Bouchède, and Kevin Janssens, who looks like a Gallic Aaron Eckhart), they catch up and leave her for dead in the desert. But they don't finish the job, and she goes on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge. Sounds like a sleazy rape-revenge exploitationer in the vein of I Spit on Your Grave or Thriller: A Cruel Picture, right? However, Revenge director Coralie Fargeat is able to subvert the tropes that normally dominate the genre without ever skimping on visceral thrills. For one, Lutz has this intensity that's equal parts manic and sympathetic, so we're cheering her on as she outsmarts her increasingly flustered assailants: what she does with shards of broken flashlight glass had me peeking through my fingers worse than I did during the severed artery scene in Black Hawk Down. That said, the path to violent avenger takes a while, and Fargeat complicates our reaction to her heroine. She introduces Lutz as a sexualized Barbie doll, all tiny skirts and tinier underpants, so that her rapist (Colombe) accuses her of "asking for it" before he assaults her. And at that, Fargeat has trapped the audience. She knows that many of us were probably thinking the same thing, and she plans on punishing us for any "blame the victim" mentality just as Lutz punishes her on-screen victimizers. Lutz isn't hurting anyone the way she dresses or acts, but Colombe's sweaty loser sure is the moment he violates her. For all the film's lovingly detailed violence, Fargeat stages the actual rape with comparative restraint. It's awful, but we see no nudity, and we get only glimpses of Lutz's agonized face and hands. Fargeat is more interested in conveying a free-floating aura of violation that makes it just as disturbing when Bouchède's character turns up the TV in the other room to drown out Lutz's screams. What I found particularly provocative is that Fargeat doesn't desexualize Lutz after she starts hunting these men. If anything, she starts prowling the desert like Lara Croft (if nothing else, Revenge acts as a hell of an audition reel should Alicia Vikander not want the job anymore). You get the sense that Fargeat finds nothing sexier than raw agency. I suspect that some of you might think I'm reading too deeply into an otherwise lurid programmer, and maybe I am. But consider the gendered ways Lutz dispatches her foes. Without spoiling too much, her retribution hinges off fears surrounding the male gaze and reverse penetration. The great critic Manny Farber liked nothing more than a meaty slice of termite art - those B-movies that satisfy a greater social/political/cultural need simply by putting their heads down and going about their bloody business - and I think he would have loved Revenge. It burrows deep.