Mark Reviews Movies: THE PREDATOR

Become a fan on Facebook Follow on Twitter

Review by Mark Dujsik | September 13, 2018

One of the Predators in The Predator is new, but the alien hunters are the most forgettable things in the movie. That might be three official installments and two spin-offs over the period of three decades talking, but even so, it doesn't feel as if this series is capable of coming up with a single new idea. The new-ish concept here is that there is a different kind of Predator that shows up to hunt a ragtag group of humans in a place with a lot of trees. The big difference is that the new alien is, well, bigger.

Obviously, that's not a significant change. It's the same old Predator, only, this time, it's 11 feet tall and doesn't have to wear armor, since it has a tough exoskeleton that just happens to look like skin. This also means that the creature is an entirely computer-generated creation, and it leaps and stomps around a suburb and, later, a forest (because these movies apparently can't move forward without stopping at a place with a lot of trees) without any sense of genuine weight or force.

If the Predator in a Predator movie is dull, what's left? There are the humans, of course, and they, at least, fare much better than the alien, although that isn't saying much. The hook for co-writer/director Shane Black's installment in this stale franchise is that our group of human heroes is made up of a bunch of clinically insane soldiers, as well as a sniper, an evolutionary biologist, and a solider with Tourette syndrome, whom Black lumps together with the insane soldiers and uses as vulgar comic relief. There's also a kid who's on the autism spectrum, but at least he's seen in a mostly positive light—when the other characters aren't calling him a certain insensitive word, that is.

One has to put such thoughts aside for any of this work, and to a degree, Black eases our ability to do so by making all of these characters one-note. The sniper is rough and rugged, with a devil-may-care attitude. The biologist is a woman who's smart and, in a firefight, at least doesn't shoot any of her teammates (She does shoot herself in the foot with a tranquilizer gun, though). Each of the soldiers, stopped on their way to a psychiatric hospital to help defeat the Predator, has his own primary characteristic, although the majority of them are just here for comedy.

Black probably would laugh off even the suggestion that, maybe, treating mental health issues as a means of earning cheap laughs is either thoughtless or downright lazy. Then again, he co-wrote this screenplay, which is filled with examples of such a method, so perhaps he isn't the best authority on the subject.

The plot will be familiar enough to anyone who has seen even the first film. A Predator lands on Earth and proceeds to kill a bunch of people. Quinn McKenna (Boyd Holbrook), the sniper, is on a covert mission to save some hostages from a drug cartel when the alien lands. After the creature kills his squad-mates, McKenna ends up in possession of the alien's helmet and wrist gauntlet.

Before being detained by some secretive federal agents, he mails the alien technology to a P.O. box back home, but they're rerouted to his former house, where his ex-wife (played by Yvonne Strahovski) and son Rory (Jacob Tremblay) still live. Rory, the kid with autism, thinks the technology is some kind of video game, and using it sends a signal to the original Predator and its bigger cousin.

As for the other characters, there's Casey (Olivia Munn), the biologist who's called in to study the Predator after it's captured. Traeger (Sterling K. Brown), who's in charge of the examination, serves as a villain until the Predator starts hunting him, too.

On a bus with McKenna, whose claims that he saw an alien mean a one-way ticket to the psych ward, is an assortment of guys who call themselves "loonies." Nebraska (Trevante Rhodes) is there for a suicide attempt. Coyle (Keegan-Michael Key) was involved in a friendly-fire incident and now makes jokes. Nettles (Augusto Aguilera) is obsessed with the Bible, and Baxley (Thomas Jane) has Tourette's. Lynch (Alfie Allen) is there, too, for a reason that's lost in the quick succession of explaining each character's primary "quirk."

The team has to fight the two Predators, as well as the bigger Predator's alien dogs, and after some in-fighting between the aliens, they're left to tackle the big guy. There's nothing new here—a lot of shooting and explosions, punctuated by the assorted characters making jokes along the way. Black tries to recapture—and perhaps subvert—the unbridled machismo of the original film (He played one of the doomed soldiers in it, by the by), but once all of the action starts, the movie falls into a familiar routine that keeps any possible subtext at bay.

The Predator offers some cosmetic changes to the heroes and the aliens. In other words, it provides nothing that's really new.

Buy Related Products