The Preda­tor

The poster for Shane Black’s The Preda­tor sees a giant, cloven hand clutch­ing the detached skull and dan­gling metal­lic spinal cord of a deceased alien hunter. Green gak drib­bles from the out­er pores of this sick tro­phy. It trig­gers images of seedy, all-night video shops in grey sub­urbs, out­lets that would traf­fic in the type of obnox­ious, cheap­jack gore flicks that young chil­dren one day dream of being able to view. Yes, par­ent: we all said we want­ed to see Flight of the Nav­i­ga­tor or Lit­tle Mon­sters, but we were secret­ly pin­ing for you to drop your guard and slam a Blood­sport or a Ghoulies down on the desk.

Black has made what feels like a pre­ci­sion-tooled throw­back to the heady days of nasty, VHS grime, the type of ​“movie” (not a ​“film”, per the direc­tors own admis­sion) whose sole pur­pose is to jack up the kill count as each new scene rolls in. His aes­thet­ic is mod­ern ret­ro­grade, slick but not too slick, with every aspect made to look arti­fi­cial. His com­mit­ment to plot and log­ic are laugh­ably cav­a­lier. Yet he pro­pos­es a pact: if we don’t wor­ry about it, then nei­ther will he. There’s almost the sense that he is pur­pose­ful­ly try­ing not to make the The Preda­tor too good, too fun­ny, or too slick, lest it drop its cloak of invis­i­bil­i­ty and reveal itself as, well, a film rather than a movie. Which is all fine.

Maybe defend­ing a work by con­tend­ing that its rough edges have been left that way on pur­pose is a bridge too far, but there’s enough here to sug­gest that Black and co-writer Fred Dekker have run a fine tooth­comb over the orig­i­nal movies and attempt­ed to dis­cern what made them tick before lay­er­ing on the myr­i­ad call-backs. Boyd Holbrook’s Quinn McKen­na is the high­ly dec­o­rat­ed army sniper who, while slot­ting some ran­do drug barons in a wood­ed pas­ture, hap­pens across a fall­en alien craft whose killer car­go dis­patch­es his entire team before he’s able to lock down the sit­u­a­tion. Imag­ine the entire­ty of the 1987’s Preda­tor play­ing out in all of two minutes.

Holbrook’s flinty, kill-bot turn is shorn of all but func­tion­al char­ac­ter traits, and despite two roman­tic pos­si­bil­i­ties being dan­gled in front of him, it feels com­mend­ably hard-nosed that he ends up opt­ing for nei­ther. Fol­low­ing the open­ing mas­sacre, he realis­es he’s per­haps seen too much to be trust­ed by the twitchy intel­li­gence brass, and so he mails some bat­tle spoils – a preda­tor mask and a tooled-up amulet – to his estranged, autis­tic son, played by peren­ni­al movie prob­lem child, Jacob Trem­blay. Hav­oc, of course, ensues.

And then two things hap­pen which kick off pro­ceed­ings prop­er: one, there’s anoth­er Preda­tor skulk­ing about the place, look­ing to fire a grap­pling hook through someone’s/anyone’s face; and two, the first Preda­tor, though wound­ed and heav­i­ly sedat­ed by some canon fod­der lab boys, has still got some juice in him yet. Quinn is then thrown togeth­er with a rogue’s gallery of mis­cre­ants, a screw-loose update of Dutch’s orig­i­nal wreckin’ crew, with top hon­ours going to Tre­vante Rhodes, whose Nebras­ka offers a lov­ing updat­ed of Bill Gunn’s epi­cal­ly fierce turn in the original.

Black doesn’t allow his louche, smar­tass pat­ter to over­whelm the brew, though he grabs a dirty laugh when­ev­er he can. The action sequences unfold with a grim, mild­ly excit­ing log­ic, though Black doesn’t real­ly have the same chops for dynam­ic sto­ry­telling or ten­sion-build­ing as John McTier­nan, direc­tor of the orig­i­nal. In all, this feels like the best ver­sion of a movie that’s inten­tion­al­ly try­ing to be bad, so take from that what you will.