Review: The Predator (2018)

Back in 1987 after the success of Lethal Weapon, Shane Black was the hottest screenwriter in Hollywood. He also played a bit part and was script doctor on Predator, John McTiernan’s sci-fi action classic about Arnold Schwarzenegger fighting an alien hunter in the jungles of Latin America. Black helped set the gold standards of 1980s action cinema, which is why it’s so disappointing to see him failing to recreate 1980s action magic with 2018’s soggy franchise extension, The Predator. The Predator is full of the abrasive humour and winking tone that made Black such a hit writer, but it’s also a case study in incoherent studio filmmaking, with a jumbled narrative structure, lame character development, and ludicrous pandering to timeliness in between the goofy bloodshed.

Boyd Holbrook stars as Quinn McKenna, an army ranger who encounters a Predator while on a hostage rescue. He steals some of the Predator’s gear and ships it back home to his family before getting nabbed by government agents and shipped off to detention with a bunch of other loose cannon marines (Trevante Rhodes, Keegan-Michael Key, Thomas Jane, Alfie Allen, Augusto Aguilera). Back home, Quinn’s autistic son, Rory (Jacob Tremblay), starts to activate the Predator’s gear, which alerts a ship from outer space to come hunting for the lost gear.

Meanwhile, government agent Will Traeger (Sterling K. Brown) recruits evolutionary biologist Casey Bracket (Olivia Munn) to help experiment on a captured Predator at a secret facility, only for the Predator to escape. Quinn and the arrested marines escape custody in the resulting chaos, taking Casey along with them, as they head to Quinn’s home to try to save his son and recover the Predator gear. There’s a lot going on in The Predator and none of it is very elegantly weaved together. Scenes with Tremblay’s Rory play like an after school special about autism and bullying, while Munn’s opening moments with Brown recreate a half-baked version of the Area 51 sequence from Independence Day.

Holbrook and the actors playing the crazy marines have the most success as their scenes bear the most resemblance to the original film and Black’s previous work, with a bunch of outlandish characters constantly joking with each other as they operate heavy weapons to fight a monstrous alien. Thomas Jane is particularly funny as a marine who is suffering from some mental debilitation and spouts off random, filthy phrases like he has Tourette’s; it’s undeniably crass, and maybe even a little insensitive, but also funny.

The problem with these various threads is that they don’t fit together as a unified whole. Black seems to be only interested in Quinn and the marines; not only do they fit the template for the series’ best, but they let him craft irreverent action moments, where the characters don’t seem particularly phased by the giant space alien hunting them down or the futuristic gadgets blowing up buildings and vaporizing people. But Casey’s and Rory’s stories seem grafted onto Quinn’s masculine action-comedy. Casey clearly exists to have a woman among the main cast. However, her character is so underdeveloped (the extent of her depth is her job title) and does such inexplicable things (there’s an early scene involving disrobing for decontamination that is mind boggling), that you can’t help but feel bad for Munn; she tries her best in spite of the undercooked writing and reminds me of Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s character from 2011’s The Thing prequel, who existed purely to satisfy modern Hollywood conventions, but was completely out-of-step with the picture.

Even worse is the way that Rory is written. Apparently, having Rory be a quiet, shy boy was too much. Instead, he’s an autistic savant. In an opening scene, we see bullies terrorize him in a classroom where he’s playing chess, knocking off the pieces of the various boards, only for Rory to expertly recreate every piece on every chessboard after they leave. Later, when he discovers the Predator’s gear, he is inexplicably able to activate and operate the gear. Rory falls into a long line of Hollywood depicting autistic people as geniuses, but Black and co-writer Fred Dekker aren’t content to leave the depiction at that; they actually make his autism central to the Predator’s mission. At one point, Munn’s Casey claims that autistic people are the next step in human evolution, and the Predator, which wants to take advantage of the most genetically gifted people on each planet, hunts Rory down to harness his genetic gifts for itself. Do I need to point out how absurd and offensive this concept is?

Add this to a throwaway line about the Predators making more incursions to Earth because they know humans will destroy the planet through climate change in a few generations and you get the sense that the filmmakers are flailing, trying to inject timeliness into the script, or perhaps are even trying to have a laugh at the ludicrousness of their ideas, if you’re being generous. But the entire approach is preposterous. To be fair, most big-budget Hollywood movies are preposterous nowadays, but it doesn’t help that the most appealing aspects of The Predator—the humour and the action—quickly wear out their welcome, forcing you to fixate on its absurd thematics.

As the film goes on, Black leans more and more on comedic crutches, with ludicrous callbacks and every character constantly cursing others out, as if the presence of f-bombs will compensate for the lack of punchlines. Also, as the film leaves behind Quinn’s hometown and heads into the woods, the action devolves into characters running around a British Columbian forest on the margins of a dark frame, shooting randomly at poorly-rendered CGI characters. Even in Black’s most successful directorial outings, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005) and The Nice Guys (2016), Black doesn’t show the sharpest visual command. Here, he can’t supply visual momentum or inventive action staging. You can follow what’s going along visually, but nothing is all that exciting. The CGI blood doesn’t help with the credibility either.

It’s important to remember that so much of the appeal of the original Predator went beyond Arnold Schwarznegger and the tough guy antics of the famous cast. The film also showcases John McTiernan’s unparalleled eye for visual momentum, with his roving camera and sharp editing instincts building tension and keeping the action crisp and exciting. For all of his talents as a witty jokester, Shane Black doesn’t have McTiernan’s eye for shooting action. He’s still best as a screenwriter, and even then, he has his weaknesses. The Predator may not be the disaster implied by the shaky opening scenes, but it’s a far cry from Black’s best outings as screenwriter and director. It’s another example of modern Hollywood taking a popular franchise and removing its most distinctive and appealing qualities.

4 out of 10

The Predator (2018, USA)

Directed by Shane Black; written by Shane Black and Fred Dekker, based on characters by Jim Thomas and John Thomas; starring Boyd Holbrook, Trevante Rhodes, Jacob Tremblay, Keegan-Michael Key, Olivia Munn, Thomas Jane, Alfie Allen, Augusto Aguilera, Sterling K. Brown.

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