The Predator

This movie is **definitely** not in touch with the other entries in the Predator series. The pacing is very fast. There is a lot of comedy and corny acting. The CGI is good at least. Honestly painful to watch. I think the target radiance was kids? If not for the gore and the 3 swear words.

Boyd Holbrook - a sort of love child of Mel Gibson and Michael Biehn - is the army sniper hero ("McKenna") who finds himself on the wrong end of the law after he and his team encounter the eponymous killing machine in the forest. Lucky to escape with his life, and a few souvenirs from the wreckage, he makes his way to a cantina where he posts his trophies to his wife and son before being taken into custody. Out in space, another of these would be visitors decides it needs to get that stuff back and so arrives duly determined to annihilate all who get in it's way. It turns out that the young "Rory McKenna" (Jacob Tremblay) is little short of a genius with AI - and pretty soon he, dad and feisty biologist "Brackett" (Olivia Munn) - along with a ragtag band of gung-ho prisoner/soldiers are facing up to their looming terror. Can they survive? Should they survive is probably the better question. Aside from a few scenes at the start and an admittedly lively fifteen minutes at the end, this is almost entirely devoid of the beastie we switched on to see. The dialogue is poorly written, expletive-ridden and banal; the characterisations are really shallow and there are far too many irrelevant sub-plots to distract from the (limited) focus of this 110 minute ramble of a film. The old adage - "if it ain't broke..." comes to mind. This is as far removed from the excellent 1987 introduction to this monstrous creature as it's possible to get and is, quite simply, a waste of video tape. There are plenty of adequate visual effects and pyrotechnics, but this film definitely had me rooting for the creature in the mask pretty much from the start!

Full disclosure, I've only really seen the first two movies, and after that I ignored the franchise. When the 2010 film dropped, it didn't even hit my radar and none of the crossovers with aliens I even bothered with... ...but by 2010 I was 30 and, honestly, these are rated "R" movies that I loved in my childhood. But that was the 80s when parents could take their children to bloody rated R movies and not be arrested for abuse. So, when they started making more, as much as I loved the first one, I really didn't care too much about the series. They lost me at the sequel. But 2018 rolled around and I was feeling nostalgic. I wanted a throw back to a simpler time when people weren't so high strung about everything including the movies. Why not give it a try. And, I loved Predator as a kid even though it was clearly an adult movie. But you get the feeling that this one was a rated R movie clearly made for children. I remember moments of levity in the first few...but I don't recall them being light and, almost whimsical at all. They were serious sci-fi horror films. This comes across as a Marvel movie, and though I love Marvel movies I don't want a Predator movie to feel like The Avengers. It's the Predator, it is supposed to have a different tone. It left me with a bad taste in my mouth. It was too light to be a Predator movie. It wasn't dark. It wasn't scary, and it had too much of an attempt at humor to enjoy. In other words, the movie stank. It couldn't even remember what it was supposed to be.