The Predator - Review Thread

The deleted scene with Munn and the sexual deviant probably held it all together.

Well...I'm not entirely sure how I felt about that movie. It seemed like Shane Black was playing with a lot of ideas, but didn't know which one to commit to so he just juggled them all and saw which one he could keep in the air the longest. More than anything it just seemed like he wanted to make a movie where the protagonists were mentally disabled and/or a little loony, and that idea is fun but I'm not sure it's right for a Predator movie.

I found the movie's editing confusing and at times the contrast was approaching AVPR levels of "I can't tell what the fuck is going on." It felt very condensed and unfocused, and some of the twists aren't very well established, leaving me a bit confused and going "wut." It was a whirlwind of chaos, really.

It might be the worst of the non-AVP Predator movies, rivaled only by Predator 2. The Predator certainly does have better action and features a lot more interesting things than "Predator in a city, mofos!" but Predator 2 is a smoother film overall. Predator and Predators are still my jam though.

The one consolation is that it's easily better than Aliens vs. Predator:  Requiem.  But a colonoscopy is better than that, so that's not much of an achievement.

I liked it better than predators. I thought it was fine. I had fun with it, kills we're satisfying. Enough tongue in cheekiness for me as well, wasn't badly paced didn't hate any characters aside from Jane and key getting to be a little much to start.

I'd give it a 6.5/10

I really hated it.

This was awful. Maybe the worst film I've seen all year.

The Predator is a colossal mess, so much so that I'm not really sure where to start. Probably the first thing I noticed was the film's sloppy editing. Something like 30 seconds in, and the film is already throwing us into a space battle, a Predator in distress, a military sniper (Boyd Holbrook) taking out drug lords, a crash landing, and the Predator killing humans. Huh? Who are these people? What the fuck is happening? No time is spent introducing the characters or building atmosphere. Instead, Shane Black hurls the audience into the story at lightspeed without providing any time to acclimatize to the material. We're then quickly introduced to a biologist (Olivia Munn) (and I stress quickly; she barely has any dialogue in her first scene before we cut away to someone else) who is assigned to study the recently arrived Predator, while Holbrook's sniper is being thrown under the bus by the government. Of course, Predators get loose, heads roll, and our sniper, biologist, and a bus full of zany goons have to work together to stop an evil alien hunter.

The sloppy editing makes the beginning a complete mess, but the film's rushed pacing has the added effect where basically every scene after the first act feels like it's about to lead into the climax. By extension, the film quickly runs out of steam. I want to stress that the narrative isn't exactly confusing. The basic story is so simple that it's easy enough to follow. The real issue is that things happen so fast that they have no time to resonate. I suspect there was a lot of studio interference and mandated re-edits because this thing feels very choppy, like a lot is missing.

Shane Black is not off the hook, however, as is his script (co-written by Fred Dekker) feels as though it was written twenty years ago and never updated. It's staggering to me that the dude who just made the wonderfully funny The Nice Guys could write banter so grating just a few years later. Some of the comedy here is brutally unfunny, with a lot of the dialogue being ridiculously juvenile. Not that the original Predator was some Shakespearan poetry, but it was a witty film with genuinely funny banter. This soft reboot on the other hand, is desperate in its efforts to have edgy banter to the point of embarrassment. The cast do their best to make it work, and occasionally succeed, but they're fighting an uphill battle. The film also features one of the most insultingly in accurate portrayals of a character with autism, who is wildly inconsistent in his social skills, but also (naturally), a secret genius who can figure out alien technology in a manner of minutes. This is what I mean when I say it feels like the script is twenty years old. I'd expect to see this shit in the 90s, but not in 2018.

What's frustrating is there are glimmers of what could have been a moderately fun movie. Early scenes of The Predator simply killing humans are very over the top in their gore and chaos, and I can sort of see the fun, schlocky b-movie The Predator could have been. But these elements are lost in the horrid editing and bad screenwriting. The film gleefully introduces new ideas and drops them shortly thereafter, characters disappear from the story, and the film is guilty of your standard soft reboot missteps, like introducing a bigger and more evil Predator. The film climaxes on a boring retread of the classic jungle battle with The Predator, only this time the scene is barely coherent thanks to the dark cinematography and editing so quick you hardly notice what's happening. This climax is also littered with cliches and eye-rollingly stupid moments. Speaking of stupid moments, the sequel bait ending is flatly ridiculous and is so dumb I'm convinced Black did it as a practical joke.

The Predator is an awful movie. Brief glimpses at a fun B-movie are lost in an endless sea of horrid decisions. I suspect studio interference played a substantial role in the film's jumbled editing and lame third acting, but the core screenplay also seems to be a mess. Fans of the original will likely be disappointed and I can't imagine newcomers to the series getting anything here. Honestly, The Predator just feels like a huge waste of time, both for the audience and the filmmakers. It's time to just let this franchise die.

D-