‘Predator’ hunts for same old thrills
Two things made John McTiernan’s original 1987 “Predator” unique. The first was the concept of the Stan Winston-designed alien super-hunter, who had dreadlocks and made an eerie, bubbling sound and whose prey was human and who took grisly trophies. The other was Arnold Schwarzenegger, a superhero in human guise.
This new film “The Predator,” directed by “Lethal Weapon” scribe Shane Black and starring a stubble-faced Boyd Holbrook (“A Walk Among the Tombstones”), who is no Arnold (who is?), comes after two “Predator” sequels and two crossover “Alien vs. Predator” entries.
In other words, this new “Predator” is not very new, and it opens up with some cheesy video-game-like footage of spaceships battling over the planet and one of them plummeting to Earth with trumpets provided by composer Henry Jackman (“Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle”) blaring painfully in your ears. A running joke in this film is that the Predators don’t seem to have any landing technology. They just crash their spacecraft.
Also in opening scenes, a Predator kills the members of the unit of American sniper Quinn McKenna (Holbrook). A buff and
decorated Army Ranger, McKenna confiscates a helmet and high-tech forearm armor from the Predator’s crashed vessel and mails them to his estranged wife, Emily (Yvonne Strahovski), and young son Rory (Academy Award nominee Jacob Tremblay), who has Asperger’s syndrome and attends Lawrence Gordon Middle School (Gordon produced the original “Predator”).
Rory, who is being bullied and believes that his father “kills people,” soon masters some of the arm armor technology and goes trickor-treating wearing the arm and helmet with expected results. McKenna gets labeled a nut for what he reports and is transported to the asylum with a bunch of fellow soldiering misfits he dubs “the Loonies.”
These “Dirty Dozen” knockoffs include insubordinate Nebraska Williams (a charismatic Trevante Rhodes of “Moonlight”), who has to perform with a lit cigarette in his mouth; crazy buddies Coyle (KeeganMichael Key) and Baxley (Thomas Jane), who has Tourette’s syndrome, which is the butt of many jokes; and religious freak Nettles (an amusing Augusto Aguilera).
Back in a high-tech lab, investigating the captured Predator are evil government agent Traeger (Sterling K. Brown) and biologist Casey Bracket (Olivia Munn, who complained about appearing in a now-cut scene with an actor who is a registered sex offender).
Before you know it, the Predator is loose after a blazing shootout in the lab and looking for its stolen gear. Many more chases and shootouts follow. Half the scenes in the film, co-written by Black and Fred Dekker (“Robocop 3”), seem lifted from “Independence Day” and “Con Air,” and those trumpets never stop blaring.
Munn does not disgrace herself, but it’s odd to see her fire automatic weapons and leap on top of a Predator and wrap her legs around its neck. CGI and old school mechanical effects, including a very tall guy (6-foot10 parkour champion Brian Prince) in a Predator suit, are combined to get a vintage look and feel. But they should have just called this “Predator 6.”