Barrage of imbecility and F-bombs
Dir Shane Black Starring Boyd Holbrook, Trevante Rhodes, Olivia Munn, Jacob Tremblay, Keegan-michael Key, Sterling K Brown, Thomas Jane, Augusto Aguilera, Alfie Allen
If your quibbles with the Predator films to date have been mostly nomenclatural, then perhaps this latest sequel is for you. (Heaven knows it must be for someone.) The first Predator, directed by John Mctiernan and released in 1987, was a flamegrilled riff on Vietnam War ignominy, in which Arnold Schwarzenegger took on an extraterrestrial big game hunter with chain-link dreadlocks. But the series’ signature monster – as people keep pointing out in this present-day follow-up – was never really a predator at all, considering it hunted not for survival but its own amusement.
This is something The Predator laboriously attempts to set right, by introducing a new version of the creature who comes to Earth with more pressing business than blood sport. Loosely following on from 2010’s Robert Rodriguez-produced soft reboot Predators, The Predator is directed and co-written by Shane Black, whose quip-laden Lethal Weapon script made him the leading light of the Eighties Hollywood smartalec school. But while the Black magic of old was a great fit for Iron Man 3 it turns The Predator into a shrill, murky, retrograde bore, whose handful of punchy ideas get lost in the cracks of its terminally haywire plot.
Boyd Holbrook (Narcos ) stars as Quinn Mckenna, a former US military sniper who witnesses the Predator’s ship crash-landing in Mexico, then ransacks the wreckage and improbably posts his findings to his estranged wife (Yvonne Strahovski) and autistic son Rory (Jacob Tremblay), whose Asperger’s makes him a dab hand at deciphering Predator-ese and hacking their tech. (If this sounds insultingly reductive, wait until you see where the film goes with it.) Naturally, this puts the boy in mortal danger when the beast descends on their neighbourhood to retrieve its kit – followed by a bigger, stronger breed of rival whose presence is explained in due course. It falls to Quinn and a squad of unstable military types to wipe out both – assisted by biologist Casey Bracket (Olivia Munn).
Black’s wisecrack hit rate is dismally low, and every scene drowns itself out in a barrage of imbecility and lazily lobbed F-bombs.
When the news broke last week that 20th Century Fox had made lastminute cuts to remove a cast member who was a registered sex offender, a clumsy edit or two seemed inevitable. But the film is so generally shapeless that the emergency patch-up is impossible to spot. RC