Skip to main content

The Predator -- a review


I was looking forward to seeing The Predator, but not because I was a big fan of the Predator film series. While I enjoyed the original 1987 Predator--with Arnold Schwarzenegger and a cast of manly men squaring off against an alien hunting them in the jungles--the sequel was atrociously bad, and I enjoyed the first Aliens Vs. Predators movie more because I’m a huge fan of the Alien film series, but the AvP sequel was also another inferior entry, too. And I admit to never really being a big fan of the Predator itself, either; as a movie monster, the Predator never really felt strong enough to carry its own film series.

The real reason I was looking forward to seeing The Predator, which was released in the fall of 2018, was because it was directed by Shane Black. Shane Black is a writer/director who gave us such marvelous movies as Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang, and The Nice Guys. And he also managed to make a decent Iron Man sequel with the third entry in that series. Black got his start writing the original Lethal Weapon film, and he even appeared in the original Predator as the joke-making radio guy in Schwarzenegger’s commando team.



Black’s The Predator acknowledges all of the previous versions that came before it, making it a sequel of sorts to the original. It’s the same basic story, with a commando unit’s secret mission in Mexico becoming interrupted by the crash landing of the Predator’s spaceship. Boyd Holbrook plays the commando who survives the Predator’s assault. He manages to get his hands on Predator tech and mails it back home to a PO box, because he knows that the government might try to cover it up. Yet he forgets to pay for his PO box, and so his mail--including the alien tech--winds up in the hands of his young son.

And the adorable little tot figures out how to use the Predator’s tech (something which has befuddled teams of scientists over the years) because of his special savant abilities, which is fair enough. Yet when he wears the Predator’s mask and gear (which is obviously too large for him) out on Halloween night, that was when The Predator started to lose me. The Halloween sequence was just a little too cutsie-pie for my taste, watering down one of the elements that made the Predator such a ferocious threat in the original 1987 film: its high tech.



I get the feeling, watching The Predator, that it suffered extensive studio interference. Because the film has this uneasy tone where it doesn’t really know whether it wants to be a slapstick comedy, or a full-on action thriller. The comedy elements actually work very well; the banter between the squad of ‘section eight’ soldiers (all great actors) is very funny. And Olivia Munn manages to shine very nicely here.




But The Predator just keeps teeter-tottering back and forth between two different tones until it reaches an overly annoying ending that feels like it has been tacked onto the movie. The Predator is far from being the worse entry in this film series; it’s enjoyable in a laid-back, don’t-think-too-hard-about-it kind of way. It’s just that with Black at the helm, I was hoping The Predator would be a lot better than it turned out to be. --SF






Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Rebel Moon Part One -- a review

Director Zack Snyder has made enough of my favorite films ( Man of Steel , Zack Snyder’s Justice League , the Dawn of the Dead remake) that I genuinely look forward to his latest project. Of course, he’s also made some real stinkers ( Sucker Punch , Batman Vs Superman ), but everybody has a bad day at the office, right? And I was brightened up considerably when I saw that his latest film, the star-spanning space saga Rebel Moon: Part One: A Child of Fire , would be premiering on my birthday on Netflix. And then I saw the frigging movie. Seriously, WTF did I do to deserve this on my birthday? Rebel Moon first started out life as a pitch for an R-rated Star Wars film that Lucasfilm, the producers of SW, had turned down. Undaunted, Snyder then brought the project to Netflix, and traces of its Star Wars inspiration still remain: the space Nazis, a scene in a cantina, the laser swords that one of the characters uses. But even if a film is
Post a Comment
Read more

Jack Reacher Never Go Back -- a Review

I was first introduced to Jack Reacher through the Tom Cruise movie of the same name that was released back in 2012. I liked the movie well enough, despite a few nitpicks here and there--but I really enjoyed reading the novels by Lee Child. Jack Reacher was a former US Army officer who retires and becomes a drifter, roaming from state to state in the country that he fought so hard to protect. And Reacher is still protecting us, taking on a variety of villains, from backwoods mobsters to big-city terrorists from book to book. The stories in the books are well-told, with great attention paid to the smallest of details. I think of them as 1980s action films, only without being insulting to your intelligence. What a perfect series to adapt to movies, right? Well, Tom Cruise looks nothing like how Jack Reacher is described in the books. And while I thought the first Jack Reacher film was good, the second, Jack Reacher: Never Go Back , is very badly flawed. Based on the JR novel of the sa
Post a Comment
Read more

3 Body Problem

3 Body Problem , Netflix’s latest TV series, is loosely based on the first novel in the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy, by Chinese author Liu Cixin (who also wrote the book The Wandering Earth ). Simply put, it’s an alien invasion story, but one that’s a lot more sophisticated than your average ‘pew-pew-pew’ cliché-fest. For one thing, this series begins in the 1960s, in the middle of the Cultural Revolution, which was the nationwide purge instigated within China by then-Chairman Mao to keep himself in power. A young woman named Ye Wenjie arises from the chaos to become a central figure in the overall story. The 3 Body Problem of this series’ name refers to a far-flung solar system that has three suns. Any planet within this tri-sun system would have a hard time of it, taking turns orbiting one belligerent sun after another, and it just so happens that the aliens who set their eyes on invading Earth--known as the San-Ti--come from this embattled world.
Post a Comment
Read more