Chattanooga Times Free Press - ChattanoogaNow
‘The Predator’ is a snarky, gory reboot with some ugly baggage
More than once in “The Predator,” a slicked-up, snarkedout piece of action- comedy bloodletting from the writer-director Shane Black, the characters pause to debate whether their enemy really deserves the name he’s been given.
Considering the relative patience and sophistication with which this alien assassin tracks his targets, they reason, he’s not really a predator so much as some kind of sports hunter.
But it’s a futile discussion. The name “Predator” has stuck to him and his masked- anddreadlocked cohorts in six different movies now, and besides, “Alien vs. Sports Hunter: Requiem” just doesn’t have the same drawing power. You’re watching a Shane Black picture, which is to say a movie that proudly knows it’s a movie and means to treat its derivative material with a flippant, genre-savvy wink.
He approaches the meathead action clichés of the 1980s and ’ 90s with unmistakable relish, and so “The Predator” will make you laugh and groan in ways that its 1987, 1990 and 2010 predecessors didn’t, at least not intentionally so. The punchlines are plentiful, the scares nonexistent. From the beginning, the script, written by Black and his frequent collaborator Fred Dekker (“The Monster Squad”), strikes a tone somewhere between sarcastic and slapdash. The first thing we see is an alien ship manned by a Predator (why bother with the element of surprise?) hurtling toward Earth and crashing somewhere in the Mexico jungle, just in time to upset a tense hostage situation and leave a lot of narcos dead.
The sole survivor of this skirmish is an ex-U.S. military sniper, Quinn McKenna (Boyd Holbrook), who suddenly finds himself in possession of some hightech alien weaponry. Before long, however, he is apprehended and tossed into the same government facility where the unconscious Predator has been laid out on a slab, to be studied by a team of scientists (led by an arrestingly sinister Sterling K. Brown) who have been keeping tabs on the Predators’ regular visitations to Earth.
Naturally, the Predator doesn’t stay unconscious and shackled for long; nor is he the only one of his nasty kind to appear on the scene. It eventually becomes apparent that the Predators are playing their own most dangerous game, one that involves high-speed intergalactic pursuits and seems designed to exact as much human collateral damage as possible.
The movie, with similar playfulness, has McKenna join forces with “the loonies,” a raucous crew of PTSD-scarred banter machines played by Trevante Rhodes ( the genial standout of the bunch), Keegan-Michael Key, Thomas Jane, Alfie Allen and Augusto Aguilera.
Also along for the noisy, splattery mayhem is an evolutionary biologist named Dr. Casey Bracket (Olivia Munn), who is brought in for her scientific expertise but soon finds herself relegated to the all-important tasks of running around with a gun and turning the heads of her male team members.
Meanwhile, the task of figuring out the Predators’ game plan falls to McKenna’s son, Rory (Jacob Tremblay), a boy genius who’s on the autism spectrum. Whether this plot development is meant to inject some sweet sentimentality into the picture, or to mock the very idea of sweet sentimentality, remains unclear.
And so it goes with “The Predator,” whose motives manage to be both utterly transparent and a bit of a blur. From time to time its mix of foul-mouthed bro camaraderie and in-yourface violence nods in the direction of modest entertainment value, but the net effect is a whiplash- inducing muddle. The movie is full of noise and energy but devoid of real wit, coherence or impact.