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
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