After the super-hot, high-fashion model Celine (Elsa Pataky of Fast Five) disappears one night in Italy, her almost-as-hot sister, Linda (Emmanuelle Seigner, Mrs. Roman Polanski), persuades goateed FBI inspector Enzo Avolfi (Adrien Brody) to help find her. In a voice that apes Columbo, he agrees, but only because he suspects she’s been abducted by a serial killer he’s there to track.
Said slayer is known as Yellow, so dubbed for his jaundiced skin that’s a shade or two away from full-on Oompa-Loompa. He’s a cabbie who dresses in a hoodie and an Axl Rose bandana. He sucks on a pacifier, reads pornographic comics and talks like Gollum. He only kills young, beautiful, young foreigners, making them ugly in various ways, like planting a hammer to a forehead. You know, the
get-shit-done stuff.
Giallo was greeted with critical scorn, but I believe if it had any other director’s name affixed but Dario Argento, response may have been better. Not that it’s great, but it’s more serviceable than your average Hollywood killer thriller. Plus, all of the horror maestro’s signature touches are intact: vivid colors, uncomfortable close-ups, unflinching gore.
Okay, so the ending is anticlimactic, and Yellow a real goofball of a villain, but nothing so awful that Brody need bad-mouth it to the press and attempt to have his name removed from it. Of all the misbegotten projects he could have disowned after winning an Oscar — The Village, The Jacket, King Kong — and this is the one he sticks his nose up at? And that’s one prodigious beak! —Rod Lott
From what I read Brody’s problem with the film had less to do with its quality than the fact that the producers failed to actually pay him his contractually obligated fee.
And I would take KING KONG over PREDATORS any day of the week (especially if someone released a special non-director’s cut that removed the hour of pointless character junk Jackson insisted on keeping for no justifiable reason).