C-Directed by Shane Black Starring Boyd Holbrook, Sterling K. Brown, and Olivia Munn Review by Jon Kissel |  |
Everyone’s favorite intergalactic trophy hunter, the Predator, shouldn’t be a difficult creature to build a movie around, but there’s somehow only been a single strong film about one of them and a string of mediocre follow-ups. Shane Black continues this tradition with The Predator, yet another entry that can’t measure up to the original. Having previously spent time in the jungle, the inner city, and a planetary game reserve, Black considers where the series hasn’t been yet and settles on suburbia, an environment that allows him and his impressive cast to hunt and be hunted on unimpressive grounds. The Predator doesn’t need to be bursting with ideas as the root premise is so simple, but this film lacks anything novel and the ideas it does have are terrible.
The first several minutes of the film contain all of the Schwarzenegger-led 80’s classic. Commando Quinn McKenna (Boyd Holbrook) and his squad happen to be operating in the vicinity of a Predator crash-landing to earth, with Quinn the sole survivor after hastily strapping on a Predator armament and incapacitating the beast. Having compressed the franchise beginning into a few scenes, McKenna squirrels away the helmet and ships it back home to his estranged wife (Yvonne Strahovski) and autistic son Rory (Jacob Tremblay) as an insurance policy against overzealous government agents, and Sterling K. Brown’s imperious Traeger promptly demonstrates the wisdom of McKenna’s actions by taking the war hero into custody. He’s locked up with a motley crew of military prisoners who either committed war crimes or are manifesting the film’s version of mental illness, which is a series of theatrical tics and spasms. The unconscious Predator, meanwhile, has been captured and is being examined by space biologist Bracket (Olivia Munn), but Rory’s fiddling with the helmet remotely wakes it up and it runs amok in the lab, escaping and heading straight for its missing equipment. McKenna, conveniently situated in a bus outside the lab, rallies his newfound comrades to go after it, but they soon discover that the Predator has a reason for coming to earth beyond hunting.
The desire to ground The Predator, a franchise entry about a technologically advanced alien ninja, in a paternal relationship between McKenna and his son already seems questionable. In the same way Ridley Scott has taken the Alien franchise off the rails with grand concerns about creation and Paradise Lost allusions, Predator flicks don’t need to be anything more than a will to live in the face of overwhelming odds. Who cares how a dad is relating to his neuro-atypical son when a monster just shot through a wormhole? Black and co-writer Fred Dekker continue to put too much thought into the themes of the film with mentions of climate change, such that the Predators are assumed to be visiting earth because the clock is ticking and they want to get as many skulls as possible. The last straw is the Jenny McCarthy-levels of misinterpretations of autism, wherein Rory is some kind of indigo child who represents the next step of human evolution. This presumes that autism hasn’t always existed and is instead some kind of X-Man-esque superpower. None of this is necessary and only serves to make what should be an easy assignment into an irritating chore.
Black compounds things by making the bread and butter action scenes into incomprehensible clouds of darkness and arterial spray. Having directed Iron Man 3 and The Nice Guys, one would think that he could build a setpiece, but instead, I was prompted to rewind scenes to ascertain what happened to important characters. No viewer should ever be confused as to which famous actor’s head just exploded. The film also takes a brute force approach that turns the action away from the stealthy nature of earlier Predator entries and therefore neutralizes what made the franchise unique. Between action scenes, Black’s signature rapport-based humor is present but infrequently, allowing for a mere handful of laughs from a director best known for action comedies.
For Black to assemble the likes of aforementioned actors plus the likes of Trevante Rhodes, Keegan Michael Key, Alfie Allen, and Thomas Jane amongst McKenna’s squad of escaped convicts and deprive them of repartee and inventive set pieces is especially disappointing. Brown is having the most fun as a Nicorette-chomping utilitarian, but the rest fail to make much of an impression outside of action flick tropes. The Predator can’t even measure up to the schlocky fun of Paul WS Anderson’s Alien Versus Predator, a film with a quarter of the star power. How this movie wasn’t a success is a mystery that could only be solved by some kind of make-believe autistic genius. C-
The desire to ground The Predator, a franchise entry about a technologically advanced alien ninja, in a paternal relationship between McKenna and his son already seems questionable. In the same way Ridley Scott has taken the Alien franchise off the rails with grand concerns about creation and Paradise Lost allusions, Predator flicks don’t need to be anything more than a will to live in the face of overwhelming odds. Who cares how a dad is relating to his neuro-atypical son when a monster just shot through a wormhole? Black and co-writer Fred Dekker continue to put too much thought into the themes of the film with mentions of climate change, such that the Predators are assumed to be visiting earth because the clock is ticking and they want to get as many skulls as possible. The last straw is the Jenny McCarthy-levels of misinterpretations of autism, wherein Rory is some kind of indigo child who represents the next step of human evolution. This presumes that autism hasn’t always existed and is instead some kind of X-Man-esque superpower. None of this is necessary and only serves to make what should be an easy assignment into an irritating chore.
Black compounds things by making the bread and butter action scenes into incomprehensible clouds of darkness and arterial spray. Having directed Iron Man 3 and The Nice Guys, one would think that he could build a setpiece, but instead, I was prompted to rewind scenes to ascertain what happened to important characters. No viewer should ever be confused as to which famous actor’s head just exploded. The film also takes a brute force approach that turns the action away from the stealthy nature of earlier Predator entries and therefore neutralizes what made the franchise unique. Between action scenes, Black’s signature rapport-based humor is present but infrequently, allowing for a mere handful of laughs from a director best known for action comedies.
For Black to assemble the likes of aforementioned actors plus the likes of Trevante Rhodes, Keegan Michael Key, Alfie Allen, and Thomas Jane amongst McKenna’s squad of escaped convicts and deprive them of repartee and inventive set pieces is especially disappointing. Brown is having the most fun as a Nicorette-chomping utilitarian, but the rest fail to make much of an impression outside of action flick tropes. The Predator can’t even measure up to the schlocky fun of Paul WS Anderson’s Alien Versus Predator, a film with a quarter of the star power. How this movie wasn’t a success is a mystery that could only be solved by some kind of make-believe autistic genius. C-
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