 |
Concrete Jungle | Rating | |
| C | |||
| Nathan Archer | |||
| Series | Related Books | ||
| Predator | N/A | ||
Police officers Rasche and Schaefer are looking for the man who literally butchered both sides of a drug meeting. But the perp isn't a man at all, or even close. With their chief doing his best to ignore all the killings and the feds convinced the aliens will leave if they're just left alone, the pair is on their own in their attempts to take down the extraterrestrial sportsman.
In 1987, Predator came out, set in South America. Predator 2 was released in 1990 and took place in Los Angeles. Concrete Jungle is set in New York City, and shares many aspects of the second move, especially in the first hundred pages or so. In fact, although it's been a good long while since I saw the movie sequel, that first third was similar enough that I was unsure if he was just ripping off the movie plot. Luckily it does diverge a little ways into the book. But that does raise another problem. Namely, the book was published in 1992, two years after the second movie. Yet events in LA are never mentioned in the book, not once. It's a major break in continuity. An understandable one, perhaps - writing and publishing a novel takes time - but I couldn't help but think the people in charge should have either told the author beforehand about the movie so he could reference it, or send it back to add them. As it is, with two stories taking place in a city, neither refrencing the other, I was left wondering if one wasn't canon.
The only other problem I found was that Archer subscribes to a shopping list of action-movie stereotypes. There's the cop with an attitude, the petty bureaucrat pushing his weight around while being way over his head, the traditional firing of the former by the latter, the feds who know all and tell just enough to show it while being entirely unhelpful about it, and of course aliens who are superior to humans in every way that is related to combat. And likely some others that I forgot or didn't notice. It all adds up, making the story almost laughably predictable.
I couldn't help thinking, as I read this, that it would have made a great action flick. As a matter of fact, it would have made a better sequel than Predator 2. There's confrontations, fights, and out-and-out battles every ten or twenty pages, there's intrigue, there's cops. But as a book, it falls a little short. The fights are important to the plot - in many ways they are the plot. But when the book is pretty much only fights, it makes the story, and all the fights, rather shallow. One of the police officers does almost nothing but follow the other's lead; there's not even a modification to the battle plan from him, much less an actual idea. The police chief is there only to be an obstruction. And so on. Shallow plot, shallow characters, shallow settings. Shallow story.
Fans of the Predator line of movies and comic books will probably enjoy this, as will readers who don't expect or intend to think much. This is a Schwartzeneggar movie in text form, no doubt about it. Kinda fun while you're reading it, but you close the book and think, "My, so many problems..."
| By Title | By Author | By Rank |