The Predator
Watching all three “Predator” films again a few weeks ago for an article I wrote for the horror blog Death Ensemble about the titular monster, it occurred to me just what a weird ass franchise this is. Similarly to Fox’s “Alien” franchise, the Predator created by Jim and John Thomas has been pulled into several different directions by different voices, all of whom have found ways to build a mythology about the creature that has been explored in different mediums and different ways. While I’m generally entertained by most of those different ways in the films, at least, John McTiernan’s 1987 film has always remained the one I return to most often, because it’s got a Hell of a hook in, “Arnold Schwarzenegger vs. alien,” and the alien is a formidable opponent, and McTiernan’s execution of that hook is inspired. Shane Black’s “The Predator” doesn’t do enough to change that view of the franchise.
The funny thing is, I think the idea of Shane Black- who played the role of Hawkins in McTiernan’s film- doing his own riff on the “Predator” franchise is more interesting in concept than it ever was going to be in execution. Don’t get me wrong- the idea of the “Lethal Weapon” and “Long Kiss Goodnight” writer and “Iron Man 3” and “Nice Guys” director being given cart blanche by a studio to put a blockbuster budget, and hard R-rating, towards a “Predator” movie is not a bad idea, especially when you let him bring on buddy Fred Dekker (who directed 1987’s “The Monster Squad” from a script he and Black wrote) to assist, but what was the expectation? Were we thinking Black and Dekker would write a dynamic and intricate script and reinvent the franchise? I think that was my thinking when the project was first announced, but once the trailers started to hit, and after people started seeing the movie, my expectations became more in line with what the reality would be- that the buddies would take Fox’s blockbuster money and make a wildly brutal entry in a franchise that has always leaned more into the slasher horror side of its concept than the sci-fi ideas of “Alien.” And I’ll fucking take what they dish out here any day of the week.
“The Predator” begins with a chase through space that ends up on Earth, as one of the titular aliens crash lands in Mexico as we get thrown into the middle of a special military ops with sniper Quill McKenna (Boyd Holbrook) as he takes aim at drug cartel members handing over hostages. Needless to say, he gets thrown into a larger situation after the Predator tears apart his team, and he manages to take it down, and take some souvenirs, knowing he may need proof that this happened after he gets scooped up by the government. As that happens, and he is detained and declared mentally unstable, and put on a bus with other mentally troubled soldiers, the package he sent with the materials he took ends up at his ex-wife’s house with his young son, Rory (Jacob Tremblay), who is Autistic, and opens it and thinks it is a game. The Predator, meanwhile, has been taken to a secret facility, where the heads of the project (including Jake Busey, apparently playing the son of his father Gary’s character in “Predator 2”) have brought in a biologist (Olivia Munn) to examine the creature. All of this happening at once, and you just know shit is going to go down, and sure enough, it does.
Let’s get some of the things I don’t like about Black’s film out of the way- a last-minute cut scene with Munn’s character (deleted after Munn discovered she was acting opposite a registered sex offender, a friend of Black’s whom didn’t reveal that information to the cast) probably introduced her character proper to the film better than the awkward intro here, and I’m not a big fan of part of the climax that involves one of the Predator’s attempts to escape. Those are my biggest complaints about the film (although some of the bawdier humor involved with Keegan-Michael Key and Thomas Jane’s characters didn’t really land with me, either) as Black really goes for broke in delivering a viciously bloody “Predator” movie that not only expands on the mythos of the Predator race, but also humanity’s awareness of it. I wouldn’t put any of the set pieces in this film on par with anything in either McTiernan’s film or in Nimrod Antal’s underappreciated “Predators,” but I like how Black acknowledges unique parts of the Predator’s MO from previous films (no unarmed women or children, hot climates attracts them) and rounds out the world of this series in a way that would make this film an interesting starting point for a new leg of the franchise, much like Ridley Scott wanted “Prometheus” to be, but more successfully, in my opinion. This is not to say that the franchise has taken a leap into the more “hard sci-fi” realm of the “Alien” series, though (this is still, fundamentally, an action-horror series, and maybe that disparity in what the two franchises are explains why neither “Alien vs. Predator” movie worked that well); but maybe, like Scott with the “Alien” franchise, Black is the filmmaker who is best attuned to drive it moving forward.
No film in this franchise has reached the stripped-down, awesome tension of McTiernan’s film, but seeing all four films recently, I think that’s part of the reason I kind of enjoy this franchise. Each one has its own energy, and while the sequels all have their issues, one thing they’ve all done is keep the Predator species pretty badass, and give it some human characters worth getting at least somewhat invested in. Again, the original did this best (and I think “Predators” is probably second), but it’s worth mentioning that Olivia Munn’s biologist has plenty to add to the film; Yvonne Strahovski (as Quill’s ex-wife, and Rory’s mother) makes you wish she had more to do than her brief appearance; the team of soldiers Quill gets involved with is ridiculous, but I was thoroughly brought into that dynamic by Trevante Rhodes’s Nebraska, who is their leader, of sorts; and Sterling K. Brown’s Traeger is the weirdest, coolest government spook since Jeffrey Combs’s Dammers in Peter Jackson’s “The Frighteners,” and I really enjoyed what he did with the role. In the end, though, it boils down to how the humans stack up against the Predator(s), and whether it’s the traditional one that first shows up here, or the gigantic one chasing him with his Predator dogs, part of why “The Predator” is a worthy entry into this franchise, whatever its faults, is that it respects the bad-ass edge the creature is supposed to have, even if Black and Dekker do add shades of personality to it. The poster I used for this review is one of my favorite images in Predator movie history, because it’s a playful way of raising the stakes, and indicative of what Shane Black is doing as he goes head-to-head with the ugly motherfucker who killed him on-screen 31 years ago.
