Featured Blu-ray and DVD Review: The Predator
December 23, 2018
The Predator - Buy from Amazon: DVD, Blu-ray Combo Pack, or 4K Ultra HD Combo Pack
The Predator is the latest installment in the franchise. The first Predator is widely considered a classic; however, since then no film in the franchise has really come close to that mark. Can this film finally rediscover the magic of the first movie? Or has the franchise run its course?
The first half an hour of this movie is a bit of a mess, as more than a dozen characters are introduced, some important, others not so much. The film weaves back and forth between the characters for quite some time, making it harder to write a coherent plot summary. It also means if you are not immediately engaged by the movie, you could easily lose interest before half of the ensemble cast is even introduced. Because of this, I’m going to write in a partially non-chronology order.
We begin in space with a couple of spaceships engaged in a battle. One of them is taking all of the hits, but manages to open a warp gate to get away; however, it is too damaged and begins to crash into a planet. It just happens to be Earth. The Predator aboard makes some final preparations, gets in the escape pod, and abandons ship.
We then switch perspectives to Quinn McKenna, a sharpshooter looking in on a hostage exchange between drug cartels. While he is lining up his shot, the Predator’s escape pod begins to crash into the ground. McKenna quickly takes the shot and races over to where the pod appeared to have crashed. He manages to grab some gear and get out alive, which is more than his two fellow soldiers were able to do. He sees a military helicopter fly by. It’s one of his, but he runs the other way. He knows after what he saw, his military isn’t going to be his friend, and he’s right. He gets to a small town and has someone mail the Predator gear for him, before he is captured by the police, on behalf of Will Traeger, the man in charge of dealing with these alien encounters. Soon McKenna is in front of a psychiatrist who’s trying to find an excuse to commit McKenna. As soon as McKenna mentions aliens, it’s enough. Soon he’s on a bus to the looney bin with Nebraska Williams, Coyle, and three others I had to look up to remember if they were in the bus or not. That’s not a good sign.
We then focus on Rory McKenna for a bit. We learn two things, Firstly, he’s autistic. Secondly, his dad mailed the Predator gear to his estranged wife’s house. Rory gets to it first and soon not only activates the alien technology, but seems to be able to decode it and operate it.
The next character we meet is Casey Bracket, an evolutionary biologist who is brought in to examine the Predator. While we didn’t see it, Will Traeger and his team were able to capture the Predator and clean up the crash site removing any alien tech. Casey Bracket meets Sean Keyes, whose father was in Predator 2. (Both the actor’s father and the character’s father is in the earlier sequel, which is a nice touch.) When she meets with Traeger, she asks why is she there. She’s an expert in hybridization, not aliens. However, initial tests of the predator reveal something alarming. It has human DNA. She has more questions after this, some of which she wants to ask McKenna, which prompts Traeger to get the bus rerouted to the base.
It is at this time that the aggressor spaceship from the opening finally makes it to Earth, just in time for the Predator that was captured to wake up and make a break for it.
We’ve hit the action, so we’ll end the plot summary there.
This is a frustrating movie to watch. You can clearly see elements that should add up to a solid movie, maybe even great movie, but the parts never combine into a cohesive whole. It is almost better to watch a movie that’s simply bad than one that had the potential to be so much better. One of the issues is the cast, which as a whole doesn’t have the chemistry we saw in the first film, but it is obviously what the filmmakers were hoping to achieve. The cast isn’t bad per se, but they never gel. Sterling K. Brown is the best part of the cast and I wouldn’t mind a prequel following his character around. I do like the performances from Boyd Holbrook, Trevante Rhodes, and Olivia Munn, but the rest of “The Takedown Team”, they range from nondescript to actively annoying. I’ve liked most of these cast members in other films and TV shows and they are usually great, but here they just don’t work.
Some of the action scenes do work and are fun to watch, especially if you are a fan of the more brutal side of ‘80s action films. However, without enough characters to care about, the deaths are mostly meaningless. Likewise, some of the topics the film touches upon work, like the aliens are here to collect humans, because they know global warming will kill our species in a relatively short time. Others just don’t. Treating autism like a super power or the next stage of evolution is just... no. Don’t do that. Like I said, enough of the movie works that you can see what they were going for, but enough fails that it falls well short of its potential.
The extras begin with 7 minutes of deleted scenes. There are also four featurettes, starting with A Touch of Black, a 10-minute featurette on Shane Black, who not only directed this movie, but also acted in the first Predator. Predator Evolution is a 20-minute look at the design of the Predator over the years. The Takedown Team is a 16-minute look at the human cast. Finally, Predator Catch-Up is a nine-minute montage of the previous installments in the franchise.
This is an acceptable selection of extras for a first run release.
The Predator isn’t the worst film in the franchise, but that’s damning it with faint praise. If you liked the first film, but not the sequels, then you can safely skip this one. On the other hand, if you saw the film and enjoyed it, the DVD / Blu-ray / 4K is worth picking up.
Video on Demand
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The Movie
The Extras
The Verdict
Filed under: Video Review, The Predator, Predator, Shane Black, Gary Busey, Jake Busey, Boyd Holbrook, Olivia Munn, Yvonne Strahovski, Keegan-Michael Key, Jacob Tremblay, Sterling K. Brown, Trevante Rhodes