The Predator (or Predator 4, if it wasn’t titled by an asshole) is a colossal disappointment. I love the original Predator and Predator 2 is highly underrated (fun fact: Predator 2 was the first movie to receive the NC-17 rating when that replaced the X rating in 1990), but the series has been downhill ever since. Predators is okay, but not nearly on the level of the first two films, and I’m reluctant to even acknowledge the Alien vs. Predator movies. But I had high hopes for this entry because of the creative team behind it. Director Shane Black and writer Fred Dekker may not be household names, but they have brought us some great movies like Lethal Weapon, The Last Boy Scout, The Monster Squad, Night of the Creeps and Last Action Hero (fuck off, I like it). Shane Black was even in the original Predator (he’s the guy that constantly makes pussy jokes). I was cautiously excited to see what these guys would do with this franchise, but the film sadly struggles with the same issues that have plagued the series since the second film.
Two Predator ships are chasing each other and crash land on earth. Our heroes, which include a biologist and a busload of former soldiers being shipped to a mental institution, encounter them in the suburbs and battles ensue. It’s eventually discovered that a regular Predator was being chased by a larger Predator because the regular one wants to help us fight off further Predator attacks (though he also kills a bunch of people, so his motives are debatable) and the big guy wants to stop him. Predator visits to earth are increasing because they want to get our DNA before our imminent extinction from global warming (my eyes rolled as I typed that) and the regular Predator apparently went rogue to give us a fighting chance (I think). Oh, and there are Predator dogs now. Yeah.
One of the things that makes the first two movies work is that they don’t revolve around the predator. Each of them is basically already a pretty cool movie in-progress that gets interrupted by the predator. The first film is a badass commando movie and the second is a cop action/drama that honestly could have had interesting stories if the predator never even showed up. It’s seeing those characters respond to having an alien killing machine suddenly appear and throw a monkey wrench into their plans that makes them interesting. They aren’t about the predators, they are about people reacting to the predators. That element was lost in every film since and this is no exception. This movie is about the predators and expanding the mythology behind them (did I mention they have dogs now?). While that may sound like a tempting and interesting direction, it doesn’t work. It has repeatedly not worked. It just strips the monsters of any sense of mystery or fear by making them highly visible main characters and, frankly, they become less interesting as we learn more about them. Much like with the Alien series, some things are better left unexplained. I have lost interest in both series because I have now simply learned too much. This movie is boring as a result and Predator movies should not be boring.
Also much like Predators, this movie lacks entertaining human characters. Look, it’s hard to beat the over-the-top masculinity of the original film’s cast. With Arnold Schwarzenegger, Carl Weathers, Jesse Ventura, Bill Duke, etc., that movie will make you grow chest hair and start smoking cigars by the end of it whether you want to or not. The second movie can’t match that, but it does have Danny Glover as a badass cop hunting down ruthless heroin dealers. I’m sorry, but Adrien Brody and Topher Grace (in Predators) and Boyd Holbrook and Keegan-Michael Key (in this movie) are so low on the badass totem pole that Jesse Venture couldn’t reach them with a wad of chewing tobacco. I just don’t buy these people as our heroes and I find them incredibly uninteresting. The angle of soldiers with mental disorders could have been interesting, like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest meets Predator, but that also largely falls flat. What could have been a fun scenario is just reduced to some oddball, often annoying character quirks. Thomas Jane with Tourette syndrome made me chuckle a couple of times, but he is underused and underdeveloped like all the others. Olivia Munn is fine as the scientist, but also has little interesting to do and largely comes off flat (it’s interesting that the top scientists in the world are always insanely gorgeous women in movies; I work with a lot of scientists and they rarely look like they just left a cocktail party with James Bond). The performances themselves are all serviceable, but the whole thing screams of “meh.”
I also want to quickly note that this movie treats autism as if it’s a fucking superpower and I hate it when movies do that. The main character has an autistic son that could seemingly become Professor X one day. The predator even identifies the kid as the true warrior among the group because of how advanced he is. Fucking please. That’s not only a gross oversimplification and misidentification of a serious condition, it’s just lazy writing. Shane Black and Fred Dekker are better writers than this, or at least they used to be.
The Predator, much like its predecessor, is just forgettable. It’s not awful, it’s just something that I’m going to struggle to remember in a month. Given the talent and franchise involved, that is a huge disappointment. When there is eventually another Predator, they need to bring back Schwarzenegger or Glover. Or at least bring back Jesse Ventura. That man is a goddamn sexual tyrannosaurus.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Predator_(film)#/media/File:The_Predator_official_poster.jpg
