Review: "The Predator"

BLACK, Shane, “The Predator”, Twentieth Century Fox/Davis Entertainment, 2018.

I’ve seen some pretty stupid movies in my time. Is this the stupidest? I’m thinking it has to be Top Five.

It’s not the concept – which has been road-tested to Hell and back – and it’s not even the thespians involved, who range from ‘mediocre’ to a solid ‘good’, depending upon the vehicle; it’s the writers and the producers and the director who are squarely to blame for this piece of trash. But first: some history.

Back in the Dark Ages (1987), there was a crackpot movie that came out of nowhere and took the world by storm. It was about a bunch of tough-as-nails, top-flight-but-seriously-damaged soldier-boys who went down into South America to make the lives of some drug cartel losers extremely difficult. On the way out, they ran into some trouble: trouble with a capital ‘T’ from outer space, out to indulge its joy of a-huntin’ and a-fishin’. An alien redneck to be precise. That movie was “Predator”. It was lightning in a bottle; magic: effortlessly good.

A few years went by during which some Hollywood types tried to think of a way to capitalise on the success of this film and their overarching concern took the form of the mantra “Don’t Fuck It Up!”. In 1990, they re-located everything to the big city for 1) contrast, and 2) budgetary concerns. They lost Arnie, but they snagged Danny Glover (straight off of the “Lethal Weapon” franchise success) and they made a solid, but tentative sequel – tentative in that it didn’t really do anything new and left everyone wanting more. They hadn’t fucked it up, but as a concept it was still treading water.

What they HAD done was show the skull of H.R. Giger’s Xenomorph hanging on the wall of the Predator’s space-buggy and this set bells ringing in franchise-land. Why don’t we show the Predator macking on an Alien? How cool would that be?! Yes, yes, cool indeed but two big-budget films couldn’t do the concept justice – “AVP: Alien vs. Predator” (2004) and “Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem” (2007) were both snore-fests of a grand order and did absolutely nothing to boost either parent franchise (although somehow we still got “Prometheus”…). Moving on:

The Hollywood dudes then obviously decided to get back to core business and so we got… Adrien Brody? Taking on… a Predator? Well, yes (spoiler alert!), he was the big monster in “The Village”, but that was just a dumb suit. Anyway, by this time he had an Oscar tucked in his belt and a stint as King Kong’s love rival in the Peter Jackson re-make behind him, so I guess the money people felt that all that pretty much amounted to “Arnie’s successor in a Predator movie” on paper. 2+2= um, 5? Anyway, “Predators” in 2010, was, as you’d expect, Gods-awful and not even Laurence Fishburne could pull its arse out of the flames.

All the while that this was going on, there was an entire fanbase of comics readers out there who were scratching their heads and asking themselves “how could they get it all so wrong?”. After all, from pretty much the moment Arnie walked out of the jungle in the first film - spitting out a tooth and flipping the alien red-neck the bird - Dark Horse Comics were right there, buying the rights to the property and starting to pump out year after year of high-quality, kick-arse narrative about these bad boys. With all this material flying about and pumping up the fans, how could they not make a smash-success of this property?

Well, by completely ignoring everything that the comics people were doing, that’s how. “Oh but we’re Hollywood,” they sneered; “we are a cut above the four-colour world and its tedious little maunderings. We have scope; and range; and investors who want to put pressure on our creative context in order to sell more sneakers and SUVs at the expense of any plot cohesion or artistic intent…”

*Ahem*

Anyhoo, despite all this source material, they dropped the ball.

And now there’s this.

The one thing that could be said about all of the intervening films, between the first one and this latest one, is that there was serious intent behind them. In every case, the intention was to make a solid, resonant, powerful iteration of the initial movie; something that would build on that fertile ground, say something new and move the project forward in bold directions. With this movie, the writers, director and producers got together and kicked things off with the immortal lines: “fuck it: let’s just paint-by-numbers and sink some brewskis!”

The result is this piece of garbage. It’s a complete pastiche of the first film – set in America this time so product placement can easily occur – and every character on screen is a caricature, not an actual person. Each piece of dialogue is heavily spiced with every four-letter word that they could find and Thomas Jane’s character even has Tourette’s, just to dial things up to 11. They play the Maximising Card by making a bigger, badder Predator (in the style of “The Meg”), rather than just using the ones that they already have with a bit more intelligence, and the Hollywood Morality play-book is firmly on hand as regards all of the female characters. On top of everything, they even have a running gag with a ‘Dog Predator’ repeatedly playing ‘fetch’ with a hand-grenade. Finally, just to add insult to injury, any of you out there who are on the Asperger’s Spectrum will be pleased to know that your affliction is just a sign of evolution in action. Your long-awaited super-power is in the mail.

Even the font that they used for the credits is bog-standard tedious.

Miss it. With intent.

One Tentacled Horror.