The Predator (2018)

Sniper Quinn McKenna (Boyd Holbrook) finds himself at a predator crash site. Knowing the government will try and hush it up, he mails pieces of alien tech to his P.O. Box as evidence, but it ends up in the hands of his magical autistic son (Rory McKenna), who switches it on and calls a predator. Quinn ends up imprisoned with a group of mentally unstable soldiers (Trevante Rhodes, Keegan-Michael Key, Thomas Jane, Alfie Allen, Augusto Agulera). When things go wrong for the government agents led by Traeger (Sterling K. Brown), the soldiers escape, and join with hunted scientist Casey Brackett (Olivia Munn). This sets up a four way battle, between the soldiers, Traeger and his henchmen, a predator, and a super-predator.

Some movies are too dumb to be bad, and this is one of them. Of course that also makes it too dumb to be great, but it’s a lot of fun. This is what you get when a bunch of talented people, spearheaded by writer/director Shane Black, get together and just toss things at the wall. A lot of it sticks. There are an excessive number of well delineated and skillfully brought to life characters. There’s a non-stop stream of one liners which surprisingly give depth to the characters and are witty around half the time. There’s around three hours of action squeezed into the hour and fifty minute run time, including explosions, thirty different types of small arms fire, crashes, chases, and so many deaths. This is a film packed to the gills.

OK, no one is bringing their A-game, but everyone is bringing a solid B-game. Every actor pulls it off, every scene looks good (not great, but good), and every emotional beat lands, though with more of a tap then a hammer blow. It feels like the best SyFy channel movie ever.

So am I being far too kindly in overlooking the major flaws? No, as this is the type of movie where the regular rules of what’s a flaw don’t apply. It doesn’t matter that everything is too convenient, that much of the plot doesn’t make sense, or that people just make wild leaps in assuming what the predators are up to. None of those take away from the fun. What does hurt it is it is too proper. It needed to go a bit more into Deadpool territory. It needed more extreme kills, more ridiculous battles, and a lot more offensive dialog. It’s too pretty. This is best shown by our nude scenes with Olivia Munn, or rather, our lack of them. The film focuses on her undressing for decontamination, and then again, when having her clothing on is keeping the doors from unlocking to let her escape. We should have seen her standing naked (as well as Jake Busey’s bare ass and probably some shadow swinging between his legs), but for this softest of R ratings, they play it off as if the audience should be titillated just by the thought of Ms Munn’s theoretical nudity. That’s too timid. Play ball or go home, and The Predator is the type of film where everyone should be playing, and cheating.

So, The Predator was never going to be a great film. With a bit more balls, it could have been a “classic” B-Sci-Fi cult film. With less talent it would have been trash. It ends up thoroughly enjoyable, if brain-dead.

It follows the cheesy good time Predator (1987), its nearly as good sequel, Predator 2 (1990), and the disappointing Predators (2010). There were also two Alien crossover films that everyone likes to ignore, the surprisingly good AVP: Alien vs. Predator (2004), and the not at all surprisingly horrible Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem (2007).