THIS KILLER LACKS BITE
THE PREDATOR 15
IN 1987, Arnold Schwarzenegger met his match in the Yautja, a merciless alien hunter known as the Predator.
The battle royale between Austrian lunk and sleek otherworldly killing machine razed swathes of the Central American jungle and sowed the seeds of a lucrative movie mythology.
More than 30 years later, writerdirector Shane Black – who played soldier Hawkins in the original film – resuscitates the franchise with a pyrotechnic-laden tale of “interstellar cops and robbers”.
The Predator contrives a selfcontained story of heroism and selfsacrifice centred on a band of misfit brothers in arms, who are mankind’s last hope against the titular terror.
Special Forces Army Ranger Quinn McKenna (Boyd Holbrook) is on sniper duty when he has a close encounter of the Predator kind. The military man takes the creature’s face mask and weapons-laden gauntlet as proof of the extra-terrestrial’s existence.
Soon after, Quinn is captured by US government agents and interrogated by Traeger (Sterling K. Brown), director of the mysterious Project Stargazer, who wants to get his grubby hands on the stolen alien technology.
Quinn refuses to cooperate and is consigned to a military prison bus where he meets a motley crew of veterans suffering from PTSD including Coyle (Keegan Michael-Key), Baxley (Thomas Jane), Lynch (Alfie Allen), and Williams (Trevante Rhodes).
As the dirty half dozen heads to a top-secret facility, the Predator strikes.
Meanwhile, evolutionary biologist Dr Casey Brackett (Olivia Munn) is summoned to the same facility to decode the creature’s morphology.
The Predator doesn’t spare us blood or entrails as the cast are merely lambs to the intergalactic slaughter.
A splashy coda sets up potential sequels that will hopefully never see the light of day.