Your bag is empty.
A letdown in ways even the wariest among us couldn’t anticipate, The Predator is messy, half-baked, frantic, gory and—for all its self-congratulatory one-liners—depressingly dumb. Directed and co-scripted by Shane Black (Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, The Nice Guys), this one trivializes and jokes the living daylights out of a bare-knuckled, 30-plus year-old sci-fi/action movie series.
You can see what the slick, wickedly sarcastic Black—who had a tiny, snarky role in the 1987 Predator—might have been aiming for here. Loading up his movie with references to the five earlier Predator movies, the writer-director tries marrying the fun of a pulpy 1980s-style sci-fi flesh-shredder with a contemporary, jolt-y sense of the ironic. You can’t say that he hasn’t made The Predator pacey or insanely violent, or that he hasn’t stuffed it to the gills with (so-so) special effects—or hasn’t (mostly, anyway) cast it well.
But you also can’t say that it always works. At least, not with a straight face, you can’t. Even at 108 minutes, it drags. As dramatized by co-screenwriters Black and Fred Dekker (Robocop III), most of the gunfire, explosion and monsters stuff revolves around Army Ranger Quinn McKenna (Boyd Holbrook of Narcos and Logan), who hides a stash of kick-ass alien hardware after he’s attacked in the Mexican jungle by interstellar, dreadlocked mega-Predators.
McKenna sends the medieval-looking metal mask, arm shield and other mysterious paraphernalia to his estranged wife (Yvonne Strahovski from The Handmaid’s Tale) and super bright, gadget-savvy young son, Rory (played by Jacob Tremblay), who gets brutalized by Neanderthal classmates because he falls somewhere on the autism spectrum. As if Rory didn’t already have enough victimization on his plate, he then becomes the object of a manhunt by even bigger bullies—hordes of muscular, slimy, people-chomping aliens.
As described by loathsome government fink and interrogator Will Traeger (effortless scene-grabbing by Sterling K. Brown of This Is Us), these constantly evolving outer-space beasties are “large, they’re fast, and fucking you up is their idea of tourism.” And fuck people up they do for the rest of the movie, including in a satisfying Halloween sequence in which Rory dons the alien mask and unwittingly unleashes fiery mayhem.
The biggest chunk of the movie is devoted to Rory’s father teaming up with likably steely biologist Olivia Munn (who must deliver a line, straight-faced, that explains how autism is human evolution’s next level) and a cuckoo’s nest of overly chatty military rejects branded as “crazies.” The standout of the bunch is suicide-prone, blunt-happy Nebraska Williams, played for keeps by Trevante Rhodes from Moonlight. Also along for giggles and gory kills of the green-blooded mutants are PTSD-stricken Thomas Jane (afflicted by not-especially-convincing attacks of the terrible Tourette’s); Augusto Aguilera (who mostly just seems stoned); a sadly, completely underused Alfie Allen (Theon Greyjoy on Game of Thrones); and a constantly “Yo mama” jokester Keegan-Michael Key (usually tops, but quickly wearing out his welcome here).
When the raw material of the humor is Asperger’s and war-related mental damage, the laughs catch in the throat.
We’re set up to buy that they all suffer from deep trauma and various degrees of PTSD, but this is the kind of movie that tries selling the notion that, when going mano a mano in brutal combat against vicious enemy aliens, these poor souls don’t regress, they thrive. Hey, we’re all for jokiness, not that many of them land in The Predator. But when the raw material of the humor is Asperger’s and war-related mental damage, the laughs catch in the throat.
Ditto a scene in which Munn’s character awakens in a motel-room bed strewn with gifts from the ex-soldiers who stand there staring at her. The scene is played for laughs, and although the inspiration is clearly Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the optics are queasy—especially for a movie mired in controversy over an entire cut scene involving an actor whom Munn rightly outed to the director and the studio as a convicted sex offender.
But hey, The Predator is clearly intended to be a popcorn flick—all shits and giggles, blissfully untethered from real-world, earthly concerns and sensitivities. After all, when the characters discover that the Predators are not only growing larger but also mutating into sentient beings, one of them pops the big question—so, who exactly was the first human to fuck an alien? Maybe the answer will be revealed in yet another sequel, but for the time being, at least we know who fucked The Predator.