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The Predator
In 1987, Arnold Schwarzenegger met his match in the Yautja, a merciless alien hunter known as the Predator, designed by special make-up effects wizard Stan Winston. The battle royale between lumbering Austrian lunk and sleek otherworldly killing machine razed swathes of the Central American jungle and sowed the seeds of a lucrative movie mythology. More than 30 years later, writer-director Shane Black - who played ill-fated soldier Hawkins in the original film - resuscitates the franchise with a pyrotechnic-laden tale of "interstellar cops and robbers". The Predator contrives a self-contained story of heroism and self-sacrifice centred on a band of misfit brothers in arms, who are mankind's last hope against the titular terror. Foul-mouthed comedy and gore-slathered horror are uneasy bedfellows in a wayward script co-written by Fred Dekker, which honours previous chapters in the series but neglects to learn from the mistakes of the past. Considering mankind has had three decades to study the Yautja, it's laughable that characters are clueless to how the alien stalks its prey using thermal imaging and cloaking camouflage. We deserve to perish. Special Forces Army Ranger Quinn McKenna (Boyd Holbrook) is on sniper duty when he has a close encounter of the Predator kind. The military man takes the creature's face mask and weapons-laden gauntlet as proof of the extra-terrestrial's existence. Soon after, Quinn is captured by US government agents and interrogated by Traeger (Sterling K. Brown), director of the mysterious Project Stargazer, who wants to get his grubby hands on the stolen alien technology. Quinn refuses to cooperate and is consigned to a military prison bus, where he meets a motley crew of veterans suffering from PTSD including Coyle (Keegan Michael-Key), Baxley (Thomas Jane), Lynch (Alfie Allen), Nettles (Augusto Aguilera) and Williams (Trevante Rhodes). As the dirty half dozen heads to a top-secret facility, the Predator (Brian Prince) strikes. Meanwhile, evolutionary biologist Dr Casey Brackett (Olivia Munn) is summoned to the same facility to decode the creature's morphology. "They've been here before: '87, '97... lately, their visits are increasing in frequency," a scientist informs Brackett. She becomes entangled with the outcast soldiers and their bullet-riddled road trip leads to Quinn's ballsy ex-wife Emily (Yvonne Strahovski) and his autistic young son, Rory (Jacob Tremblay). The Predator doesn't spare us blood or entrails as the eponymous alien cuts a swathe through two-dimensional characters. Aside from wunderkind Tremblay, who commits wholeheartedly to his complex role, the cast are merely lambs to the intergalactic slaughter. Munn's feisty scientist sprints, somersaults and brandishes a gun as if she has magically acquired military training from staring at Petri dishes through a microscope, while Holbrook is a bland and unengaging ringleader. A splashy coda, clearly influenced by the Marvel Comics films, sets up potential sequels that will hopefully never see the light of day.
