At first it seems like all the junk is going to be a feature, not a bug. After his mission to rescue hostages taken by a Mexican drug cartel is interrupted by a crashing spacecraft, US Army Ranger sniper Quinn McKenna (Boyd Holbrook) scavenges some Predator technology (a faceplate and wrist band) and mails it back to the US just before he's captured. He also swallows the equipment's remote control so he can crap it out at an important plot point later. Unfortunately he hasn't paid for his post office box in years so the post office dumps his packages on his doorstep where his estranged family take them inside. Their house is later destroyed.
Some people are going to try to tell you that The Predator starts out strong then slowly falls apart, which it does. But they're also going to try and tell you that this films growing narrative incoherence - and make no mistake, this is one of the most garbled Hollywood blockbusters in years; at once stage a dubbed in voice tells us that our heroes (in a helicopter) can track the human bad guys (long gone) by following a brain-damaged alien dog - is the reason why it falls apart. Wrong: as that previous paragraph shows, this film starts out incoherent and does not improve at any stage.
Being a mess doesn't automatically make a film bad, of course. And a lot of the dumber part of the plot can be explained away pretty easily. How does the motley crew of escaped mental patients McKenna ends up leading find a whole bunch of fully automatic military weapons with which to shoot at the Predator? How does Olivia Nunn's scientist - introduced as a biology expert and who cowers naked in a decontamination chamber early on when the Predator tears apart a research lab - turn into someone at least as proficient with military hardware as the rest of McKenna's kill team? It's America: they love their guns.
But this just keeps on piling on twists and developments and messy action sequences with close to no regard to what's happened earlier in the scene, let alone what might make for a good movie. Most of what is consistent is slightly nasty too: there's loads of gore (all of it CGI), the action is almost always just "fire lots of guns before you get sliced up", and this is a movie where literally everyone - including McKenn's on the spectrum pre-teen son - gets at least one human kill. Maybe that's intentional; it is a firm plot point that the Predators are now just coming here to get in some kills before we kill ourselves off.
Writer-director Shane Black usually has a good nose for characters, but here he's way off base. McKenna is a bland action tough guy who's totally forgettable; his motley crew of "Loonies" are initially annoying, then stick around long enough to become the emotional core of the film (McKenna's wife simply vanishes from the story half way through), then get dispatched in slightly mocking ways that make anyone who actually cared about them feel like a chump.
Meanwhile the main human bad guy is slightly memorable yet is given next to nothing to do and one of the stupidest throwaway movie deaths in recent memory, while the Predator(s) are revealed to not really be coming here for sport but then they decide to hunt some humans anyway but it's not a real hunt because they're kidnapping humans now or something. There's a Predator dog who spends half the movie playing fetch. There is now a scientific rationale for the Predator's dreadlocks.
The real problem with these films is that the money is tied up in the IP that is "The Predator", and yet the alien space hunter monster is almost always the least interesting thing about every Predator movie. The less we see of the Predator, the better a Predator movie is; all you really need to know here is that there's more than one Predator, and they don't use their invisibility shields anywhere near often enough.
- Anthony Morris
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