THE PREDATOR (2018) MOVIE NEWS & REVIEW

the predator (2018) movie

Genre              |   Science Fiction

Classification   |   MA 15+

Running time   |   100+ minutes

Released         |   13 September 2018

cast

Boyd Holbrook ... Quinn McKenna
Jacob Tremblay ... Rory McKenna
Olivia Munn ... Casey Bracket
Jake Busey ... Son Of Peter Keyes
Edward James Olmos ... Military General
Thomas Jane ... Military Veteran
​Keegan-Michael Key

director

Shane Black

writer

​Fred Dekker ... (written by) &
Shane Black ... (written by)
 
Jim Thomas ... (based on characters created by) &
John Thomas ... (based on characters created by)

cinematographer

​Larry Fong

music

film editor

​Harry B. Miller III

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box office result

Worldwide               $? million

Australia                 $? million

North America        $? million

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the best dialogue

Quinn McKenna: We're assassins. Isn't posing a threat kind of a point?

Casey Bracket: I think they're attempting hybridization. They're upgrading on every planet they visit.

THE PREDATOR (2018) MOVIE IMAGES

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Posters

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Posters

THE PREDATOR (2018) STORY SYNOPSIS

​From the outer reaches of space to the small-town streets of suburbia, the hunt comes home in Shane Black's explosive reinvention of the Predator series. Now, the universe's most lethal hunters are stronger, smarter and deadlier than ever before, having genetically upgraded themselves with DNA from other species. When a young boy accidentally triggers their return to Earth, only a ragtag crew of ex-soldiers and a disgruntled science teacher can prevent the end of the human race.

THE PREDATOR (2018) MOVIE REVIEW

Reviewed by Mark Geraghty   |   Review date 12 September 2018

​Pop ​Movee Rating

Fans of the Predator movies will be pleased to know THE PREDATOR delivers a certain amount of sentimental homage to the 1987 film that became a high-point of 1980s testosterone-fuelled, muscle-inflated Action movie mayhem. Unfortunately, Writer-Director Shane Black stuffs this latest Predator adventure with so much story that the lean-mean template of the series all but disappears and, along with it, the key ingredient of Predator franchise success. Despite Black’s long association with the franchise, dating back to the original 1987 PREDATOR, both his writing and directing - surprisingly - lack the inherent machismo required to make this fourth movie in the series a stand-alone success or a reason to keep it going any further beyond its closing credits...

This new film starts in a familiar way to the original; outer space. Instead of a lone Predator spacecraft, this time, there are two, with one in pursuit of the other. 

All of a sudden there’s intrigue...

Are the Predators at war with one another? 

Has someone or something other than a Predator stolen the ship? 

Whatever the answer, Black, along with co-writer Fred Dekker, have placed the audience on notice… This is going to be a different kind of Predator movie. (Or, is it?)

The Predator ship under attack manages to pull a nifty space-rip manoeuvre, opening a hole in the fabric of the universe and jumps to its destination in the nick of time, but not before the it’s sustained enough damage to render it out of control upon arrival. As if any doubt existed, the ship’s destination is Earth.

Meanwhile, in another nod to the 1987 film (but also a neat reference to the 1990 sequel’s drug-crazed bad guy plot points), as the Predator’s ship approaches Earth the film simultaneously introduces the lead character, Quinn McKenna, played by Boyd Holbrook. McKenna and his elite team of Special Forces soldiers are on a mission in the jungles of Mexico, picking off drug cartel members for sport. Their mission changes abruptly and unexpectedly when one of the escape pods from the Predator’s ship nearly comes crashing down upon them. 


Cue some familiar franchise tropes…

The unique and strange staccato Predator noise when all else in the jungle is silent. Soldiers skinned alive. The lead character being stalked by the alien. 

After a promising opening, the film starts to fall away at an alarming rate.

Where the original used over half of that film’s running time to allow those events to unfold, Black compresses this part of his new film into just a few short minutes. Unfortunately, he also really bungles the action in this sequence and the jump from McKenna’s first meeting with the Predator to his subsequent incarceration (because he’s had contact with the creature) seems to make little sense. This is one of the big problems with this new PREDATOR film. It’s so eager to keep the action moving, it doesn’t take enough care with transitional scenes to help develop characters the audience really cares about or plot elements that are meaningful signposts on the road to the film’s finale.

The film’s editing doesn’t help this problem…

Harry B. Miller is an experienced Sound & Dialogue Editor, having worked on BACK TO THE FUTURE, THE GAME and A GOOD DAY TO DIE HARD, but his experience as a Film Editor is confined mostly to television shows and it shows in his work on THE PREDATOR. At times, it feels as though the film is a really big TV show; it just has a lot more swearing and gratuitous violence. Miller and Black have put together action sequences that are claustrophobic when they should be epic. In a lot of instances, their cuts from scene-to-scene make little sense; sometimes picking up the action with characters in entirely different settings. At one point Trevante Rhodes’ character is on a bus with the rest of the rag-tag team fighting off the Predator, the next, he’s is a stolen police car…

As a logical sequence of events constructed to tell a story, THE PREDATOR ranks as a complete mess.

Fortunately, a number of the film’s performances lift it to “barely watchable” status…

Boyd Holbrook is not muscle-bound “metahuman”, but he makes a pretty good lead. He plays McKenna with just enough edge without making he seem completely crazy. It’s an important point because McKenna is the father of young Rory, played by Jacob Tremblay, and, at points throughout the story, he’s required to demonstrate that he still has enough humanity to be a semi-responsible parent. Holbrook does get a bit lost in the film’s finale, but he’s not the only one.

Trevante Rhodes plays Nebraska Williams. His character becomes McKenna’s philosophical sounding board for rationalizing the bizarre situation that he and the other military misfits find themselves in. Williams is as close to any character in this new film who has any resemblance to the likes of Bill Duke’s Mac, Jesse Ventura’s Blaine or Sonny Landham’s Billy from the original 1987 film.. 

Sterling K. Brown plays Traeger, the point man for the covert government organization whose job it is to watch the skies and respond to alien incursions; especially those that involve Predators on their annual hunting soires to Earth. Brown plays him as one of those likeable unlikeable characters, whose duplicitous actions make him entirely unreliable for the protagonists, but he’s fun to watch because he could just turn around and help save the day. There’s a swagger to Brown’s performance that adds an authenticity to the film that is not evident with other characters.

Performances that aren’t so good include the likes of Olivia Munn, Jacob Tremblay and Alfie Allen.

If her performance is anything to go by, it’s not entirely clear whether Olivia Munn realized she was signing up for a Predator movie. Her character, Casey Bracket, is critical to the story, but she seems like she’s in a permanent state of disbelief, her expressions ranging from dumb-founded to incredulous. 

It’s hard not to draw comparison with the 1987 film, but Elpidia Carrillo’s Anna became more important as the story progressed and her small insights into what Dutch and his team were up against provided intrigue and created a sense of dread about what was to come. In THE PREDATOR, Munn is meant to be a research scientist who has insight into “alien” lifeforms, but not for a moment does she seem credible in any way shape or form.

Poor little Jacob Tremblay. He was so good in ROOM and, more recently, in WONDER, but, in THE PREDATOR, his character, Rory, is not a human but a plot device. The story strains the limits of credibility by making Rory some kind of child genius who has the ability to decode complex alien language and operate the Predator’s technology and who also just happens to be the son of the main character who first encounters the alien upon its arrival on Earth…

It’s not really Tremblay’s fault, he didn’t write the film, but his performance is just awful. He doesn’t imbue Rory with any personality and spends most of the film simply existing in scenes.

Alfie Allen wins the award for THE PREDATOR’s worst performance. As one of McKenna’s misfits, he plays a secondary role in proceedings and isn’t critical to any part of the story other than seconding a helicopter out of nowhere at one point. However, the few lines he does have are completely incomprehensible. It’s hard to know whether anything he says is important or worthwhile...

The Verdict...

Shane Black has made a career out of writing exactly the kind of movies that THE PREDATOR should have been… An Action Thriller that takes a familiar setting and turns it on its head through the sheer force of the kinetic energy of what is happening up on the screen. 

Sadly, THE PREDATOR falls well short of that aspiration.

Where did it go so wrong?

Shane Black and Fred Dekker’s story tries to do too many things and, as a result, succeeds at none of them. The template has been relatively simple for the previous three Predator movies and it’s worked well. The new film attempts to expand the Predator mythology, using one of the film’s sub-plots as a means to build the framework for the next series of films in the franchise, but the opportunity is wasted because the body of the film is poorly executed.

It’s been reported that much of the film’s finale was reshot because Black had made an error in setting it during the day, instead of night time. When the film’s cut was assembled, it became apparent it needed to be night. This decision is reflected in what finished up on the screen. There is a sense of disjointedness about the film’s finale with two large set-pieces plus a one-on-one between McKenna and a Predator that seem to drag on a little too long.

However, that’s not really where THE PREDATOR falls down...

One of the biggest problems is the time spent after the film’s opening sequence on working McKenna’s family and Olivia Munn’s character into the story. In deviating from the established template in an effort to bring change, Shane Black bogs the film down in unnecessary subplots and, because of this, the likes of Holbrook, Rhodes and Brown never get the time needed to flesh out their characters. Arguably, the story would have been more interesting if it had been contained to the “military misfits” dealing with the Predator incursion. 

McKenna’s wife and son, the secret scientific research, Halloween and the ridiculous Predator “dog” that appear through the mid-section add nothing to the film or the franchise. 

Depending on the global box office performance of THE PREDATOR, there may be an opportunity to explore the consequences of the film’s final scene in a follow-up movie but it would require a return to the leaner, meaner plotting that helped make the franchise a success. Given the preceding 106 minutes of Black’s film, there’s a very large question mark hanging over the future of the Predator franchise.

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THE PREDATOR MOVIE (2018) USEFUL LINKS

The Predator (film) - Wikipedia
​The Predator (2018) - IMDb
​The Predator (2018) - Rotten Tomatoes

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