Predators
A good version of Suicide Squad and The Suicide Squad. This has a fantastic cold opening, you are literally dropped into the action, with miniguns rolling in the first minutes. The titular Predators don’t appear until the last half, and they remain bad hunters.
It keeps the pace at high levels, the action scenes are perfunctory at best, but the intermezzo are better. I love the idea of casting an Larry from Apocalypse Now to be their Kurtz-alike, all these years later. The nod to the first Predator is the girl describing the plot as a secret report, “Guatemala, 1987”. Not shoehorning Schwarzenegger into the film is a plus, just see Terminator: Dark Fate.
Every character is literally a criminal stereotype.
Adrien Brody is Royce, a Jewish(?) mercenary; the self-appointed leader. Alice Braga (Brazilian) is Isabella, an IDF (‽‽‽) sniper; she’s the heart of the team, the only woman, and the only one in the regular army.
There’s the Yakuza dude, a Mexican cartel enforcer (Danny Trejo), the dude from an African muslim death squad (Mashersha Ali with a silly accent), the Russian KGB asset (some dude I never seen anywhere else, probably from a CIS country), and the wildcards: some American serial killer (Walter Goggins on the role that made me hate it for a long time, the mark of a great actor), and a kind of Doctor Death (Topher Grace as a the pushover crybaby, up until the end).
It’s missing a lot of criminals…
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.