There's a character in The Predator played by Thomas Jane who suffers from Tourette syndrome. I can envision scenarios where this makes for an interesting creative choice. Imagine, if you would, a scene where Jane is being stalked by one of the deadly alien hunters but can't keep his disorder in check, constantly muttering profanities under his breath, which allows for a predator to zero in on his location. That could be an effective and narratively compelling use of such a character trait. Such a scene never occurs in this movie. Instead, The Predator uses it for exactly one reason … to have Jane bark "eat your pussy" at Olivia Munn during a scene set in a hotel room.
That, my friends, is The Predator in a nutshell. It's a vile, bawdy thriller that wants to use borderline offensive jokes and dialogue to transport you back to a time when such things were welcome in a big, gory action movie. Unfortunately, the whole enterprise lands with a thud, not just because this isn't the 1980s anymore, but also because director/co-writer Shane Black fails to bring any of his usual macho wit to the proceedings. I could be convinced that a movie that thumbs its nose at political correctness could succeed wildly in the year 2018, but it would have to be a shitload better than this hunk of junk.
Co-written by occasional Black collaborator Fred Dekker (who made the excellent '80s horror romp, Night of the Creeps), The Predator jumps right into the action. And why not? It is the sixth film in the franchise, after all. Quinn McKenna (Logan's Boyd Holbrook), a U.S. sniper out on a mission, sees the rest of his unit slaughtered when a predator spacecraft crashes down to Earth. He swipes some alien tech, which he mails off to his estranged wife (Yvonne Strahovski) and autistic son (The Room's Jacob Tremblay), before being apprehended by Will Traeger (Sterling K. Brown), a government agent who's in charge of keeping tabs on the outer-space beasties. Traeger also nabs the predator, and brings in Munn's biologist to study it. Meanwhile McKenna is put on a bus filled with mentally-unfit soldiers to be shipped off someplace where no one will believe his stories of a deadly alien creature. The predator escapes, all hell breaks loose and McKenna and his team of "loonies" (Jane, Keegan-Michael Key and some other guys who make no impression) must re-acquire the alien tech before his family becomes the predator's next target. Oh, and also, this predator was fleeing his own kind, and a new 11-foot-tall predator eventually shows up to hunt the first one down and kill anything that gets in its way.
That's the plot, and it fluctuates between being overly simple and much too complicated during the course of the movie. One critical misstep: There are like five MacGuffins in this film, and I was never quite sure which one I should follow. Is it the first predator's helmet? The little silver ball that McKenna swallows? The weird casket-like box in the crashed alien ship? Goddammit, movie, just pick one and go with it! The Predator also spends way too much time pitting the humans against each other (a problem that also plagued 2010's Predators). Traeger mostly runs around trying to kill McKenna and everyone else who knows of the existence of predators. And, hey, he must be a badass because he sneers when he threatens people and casually drops the N-word while at work. (Insert eye-roll here.) Faring even worse in the character department is Munn's biologist, who, when confronted by a rampaging predator, decides not to run in the opposite direction, but rather to grab a gun and try to kill it. All for … reasons, I guess? Honestly, I have no idea. The predator even chooses to let her go at one point, and she — A BIOLOGIST I REMIND YOU — still decides to take it on. Maybe it's because Jake Busey asked her to. Or maybe it's explained in that scene that had to be cut because Black thought that, in the era of #MeToo, it was a good idea to put one of his sex-offender buddies in the movie.
There are the kernels of two good ideas buried in this mess. One is that predator activity on Earth is increasing because global warming has made us an endangered species and the predators better have their way with us before we're gone for good. The other is a spoiler but revolves around the notion that Arnold Schwarzenegger's version of the 1980s alpha male doesn't carry as much weight as it did back then. Both are merely touched upon before being dropped in favor of more heapings of cringey, tone-deaf dialogue and a final scene that's one of the worst I've seen in a big-budget release. I honestly find it hard to believe that Black — who wrote the great Lethal Weapon … whose last movie was the endlessly entertaining The Nice Guys … who delightfully flicked comic-book nerds behind their ear with Iron Man 3 … who actually was featured in the original Predator as an actor! — is responsible for this dreck.
He does get the gore right, at least. The Predator is a brutally violent movie, stuffed with creative kills and liberal uses of blood both red and green. If that's all you want out of a Predator movie, maybe you could put up with the rest of the nonsense on display here. Me? Hey, I enjoy well-done gore. But I don't enjoy it that much.
