Predator 2
Rewatching Stephen Hopkins’s “Predator 2” for the first time in, let’s say 15-20 years, I’m ashamed at how dismissive I was of it in my review of 2010’s “Predators.” Not because I think “Predator 2” is a great sequel a la “Aliens,” but because this movie is a ridiculous amount of fun to watch. It’s certifiably insane as a narrative, to be sure, but the movie “Jason Takes Manhattan” teased “Friday the 13th” fans with, “Predator 2” is, and I can’t help but love it for that. I’m going to write more about the “Predator” franchise, as a whole, in conjunction with the release of Shane Black’s “The Predator,” but for now, “Predator 2” has my undivided attention.
The film is set in 1997 Los Angeles, during a heatwave made even hotter by the gang warfare happening on the streets. We are thrust into the action right away, as reporters are caught in the crossfire between Colombian and Jamaican drug cartels, which the police get in the middle of the war, as led by Lieutenant Michael R. Harrigan (Danny Glover). We get a bird’s eye view of the action, as well, in the heat-sensitive vision of the Predator (the late Kevin Peter Hall, reprising his work from the original). As violent as the gangs are making Los Angeles, the Predator will be upping the ante considerably, and when some usual deaths occur at the tale end of the shootout, Harrigan and his team will find themselves up against some even more formidable enemies than just street gangs.
The screenplay by Jim and John Thomas- the writers on the 1987 original- has basically transplanted the Predator from the jungles of Central America to the asphalt jungle of Los Angeles, using the backdrop of violence fueled by drug gangs as a perfect killing ground for my favorite movie monster of all-time. If you wanted to knock the film for feeding racial stereotypes of violent blacks and latinos, I certainly could not fault you for that because it very much does, but that’s more the way in to the same type of cat-and-mouse action action movie John McTiernan delivered so beautifully in the first film. I’m not going to lie, though- the drug war part of the film is a big reason why this film has an insane kick to it that makes it more entertaining than it has any right being. This is a full-on exploitation genre film, albeit one with one of the most iconic monsters in movie history at the center of things. The scene where Harrigan corners one of the gang members on the roof, and the member is spooked by the invisible Predator, is hilarious because of how over-the-top the actor playing said gang member is, and a scene when the Predator takes out five gang members in the leader’s penthouse has a brutal energy to it that makes up for a ludicrous subway massacre later in the film, which is not as intense as it should be, and plays more as camp, although that might be because it has the Predator facing off with Bill Paxton’s outrageously goofy cop, Jerry Lambert, wherein Paxton becomes the first actor to be killed by Alien, Predator, and Terminator on-screen. I think part of the reason I didn’t like it the first time I saw “Predator 2” was because of how crazy the tone of this movie is- I very much prefer the slow-burn tension of “Predator,” but it is precisely how absurd this movie is that I responded to it so well this time around.
Hopkins is not a great director, but he’s one whose name stuck with me after I responded so strongly to his 1994 bombing thriller, “Blown Away,” which he followed up with the underappreciated “The Ghost and the Darkness” and the kind-of awful “Lost in Space.” He was brought on to “Predator 2” after directing the fifth “Nightmare on Elm Street,” and he has a way of staging set pieces, and building suspense, that makes sense to this film, although the film’s weird tone kind of obscures that. As with the original film, the prime set piece happens in the second half of the film, as a mysterious government team led by Gary Busey corners the Predator in a meat packing plant. Busey’s team has been following the events in Harrigan’s investigation, and having Gary Busey as a federal spook is not even the weirdest casting choice, but Busey is so bizarre that we enjoy it more than we probably should. But the scene at the meat packing plant is the set piece I would compare most favorably to the Arnold vs. Predator mano a mano at the end of the first film. The way the team tries to trick out the Predator’s sensors, and the way the Predator recovers, and then attacks them, is terrific cinema, and Hopkins builds the sequence extremely well, and in a way that progresses through to Harrigan chasing the Predator to its spaceship, where the Thomas’s build a few, final pieces of the Predator mythos that would be developed in later movies, including the awful “Alien vs. Predator” films.
It’s surreal how many different genres “Predator 2” seems to bring into the mix. The slasher structure of the original is still there in how it dispatches Harrigan’s team (which includes Reuben Blades and Maria Conchita Alonso), and the alien firmly places the film in the area of sci-fi, even if it’s more action than “hard sci-fi.” But you also have a police procedural a la “Lethal Weapon” as Harrigan’s case continues with the investigation with everything wrapped in a layer of dark absurdist comedy that is best exemplified by Morton Downey Jr. as the host of an exploitative news show called “Hard Core” that is basically TMZ before TMZ existed. I can’t stop thinking about the Predator at the center of the film, though. Designed by the great Stan Winston, the Predator’s trademark qualities from the original film returns with more weaponry, and a slightly different design to go with the location change. And as portrayed by Kevin Peter Hall- the unsung MVP of the first two films who died of AIDS in 1991- he is still the most intimidating motherfucker to come to planet Earth. I’m so stoked for his next journey here.
