If you followed my reviews of the previous Predator movies over the summer, you might have noticed that I'm a bit of a geek when it comes to this franchise. I mean, I even had some of the Dark Horse novels when I was younger. So this latest addition to the series, slightly confusingly called The Predator, not only has to pass the test of being a good movie here but also has to prove whether or not it's a worthy entry to the franchise.
Sniper Quinn McKenna is in Mexico with his team tracking a group of drug dealers when their operation is interrupted by a crashing alien escape pod and its pilot, a (Yautja) Predator. Quinn manages to survive this encounter and escapes with some of the alien's tech, mailing it back to the US before being apprehended by the government group who have been tracking the Predators for over 20 years. In an attempt to silence or discredit him, they plan to claim Quinn is mentally ill and killed his own team, putting him in a group of veterans all suffering some form of mental illness or PTSD - but Quinn and his new friends find themselves in the middle of everything regardless when first the captured Predator escapes the facility it was being held at and attempts to recover his missing weapons and armour... and again when a second larger, angrier (Hish-qu-Ten) Predator arrives with his own agenda...
Director Shane Black is probably best-known for playing Hawkins in the first Predator movie, but he's had quite the career in Hollywood as a writer and director as well - his screenplays include Lethal Weapon, The Last Boy Scout, The Last Action Hero and Iron Man 3, the latter of which he also directed. Along with his friend and co-writer on The Predator Fred Dekker (and yes, everyone in Britain has made the requisite "Black and Dekker" joke by now) he also wrote the 80s cult classic The Monster Squad. And I have to say, the dialogue alone in The Predator is some of the best I've heard in a long while. It feels natural, real, and it flows incredibly well. Quinn and his rag-tag group of mentally unstable veterans (a lot like The Dream Team but heavily armed) feel believable for both those groups - not to mention sympathetic as well. The Predator also manages to have some of the best depictions of PTSD, neurodiversity and mental illness that I've seen in film in a while, and that's not praise I give lightly. Oh, it has a couple of slip-ups - a moment where something the Tourette's sufferer says is denied and explained away for laughs rather than just explaining his condition is one - but nothing so jarring that it can't be accepted and moved past.
Normally, when I start off praising a movie like this, it usually means I'm preparing to drop some particularly negative criticism straight afterwards. For once, that's not happening here. The Predator is a very good, lots of fun film.
Continuity-wise, The Predator follows on from Predator, Predator 2, the two AvP films (Alexa's Xenomorph tail spear is seen briefly) and Predators - the Yautja Predator here is the same one from that film that the three Hish-qu-Ten were using as a punching bag at their camp. The attention to detail and continuity is something I can really appreciate (obviously) and while I felt that more could have been done in a couple of places, like giving Jake Busey some more screen time (and is it just me, or has Gary Busey not had a child so much as just reproduced via parthenogenesis?) or having one of the protagonists from the previous films appear at the end, again, nothing is a dealbreaker here.
One thing I did have a problem with was a plot hole with regards to the Yautja Predator's actions. We discover during the course of the film that he has come to Earth to help humanity for [spoiler reasons], and while I get that he was probably understandably grumpy after being captured by the government and prodded around a bit, his first actions upon meeting any humans are not, "Take me to your leader, I have important information to share," but to start killing and stringing them up. Old habits die really hard, I guess.
The Predator is also a very wet, splattery film, with Shane Black going on record as saying, "I made a condition of my participation with Predator, that it be the same rating as the first movie, and the first movie was rated R. In other words, I don't want to cut away every time the Predator does something violent." And thank Eris for that, because I think we've all gotten frustrated with all these anaemic PG-13 horror films that don't show anything. People get holes blown in them, get limbs sliced off, get impaled on trees, disembowelled, have their heads explode... It's also best not to get too attached to a lot of the cast as well, although most of them survived far longer than I had predicted they would, and most of them get the deaths they deserve (for both protagonists and antagonist characters). Perhaps even better, the Hish-qu-Ten Predator has clearly been hitting the creatine hard and spends some of the film just ripping people apart with his bare hands, like a reptilian Brock Lesner having a really bad day. the film doesn't shy away from showing us the violence, which is exactly what an action-sci-fi-horror movie should do (with one exception which again shows that Black knows the formula for a successful film - he doesn't kill any animals. Well, one Predator dog, but it was trying to eat the humans at the time so it doesn't count under the rule of Unnecessary Animal Deaths).
I can therefore happily recommend The Predator for being not only a worthy entry in the franchise but also as a damn good movie in its own right. A sequel has clearly been set up in the film's final scene, so we shall have to wait and see if this success continues, but I think we can be optimistic...
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