The Predator

The story goes that the original script had a one minute cameo at the end in which Arnie showed up in a helicopter to tell everyone it was time to fly off into the sequel. It could have been shot in in an hour, just like Arnie’s cameos in Expendables movies. And Arnie, who in some ways is the laziest actor alive, turned it down. To me, this suggests that for once in his life, he read the whole script.

Not even the first Predator movie is anyone’s idea of a masterpiece, so it’s not as though I was waiting with bated breath for another attempt to keep the franchise going. But then they attached Shane Black to it, and I got stupidly optimistic. Iron Man 3 isn’t actively terrible. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and The Nice Guys are genuinely good movies. The Long Kiss Goodnight might be one of the best stupid action movies ever made, and The Last Boy Scout is the last time it didn’t hurt to watch Bruce Willis murdering everyone with worse dialogue than him. All right, then, I thought to myself.

No. All wrong. The Predator is a stupid, incoherent mess that looks like someone killed Shane Black, scrabbled through his dustbin for any bits of paper that didn’t have coffee grounds on them, and then went down to the studio with a rubber Shane Black mask and the hope that no-one would ask why he smelled of latex. It’s full of bits of what I think of as the single transferable Shane Black script; moppet driving part of the plot, bad parental relationships, smartass anti-heroes, even smarter-ass sidekicks, steely government conspiracies made out of evil, and as many people suffering from PTSD and psychological issues as the plot can accommodate. It’s just that it all feels like the Walmart own brand version instead of the high spec version we liked in the past.

Holding it all together, or rather not holding it all together, is a plot that sounds like someone heard two five year olds playing in the next room and tried to write down just the squeaky bits while the room they were in had a wolverine in it. Nothing makes any real sense from scene to scene; the characters need cars, and then they’re somehow IN cars, but there’s no way to figure out how it happened or if it even matters. It’s all so disconnected that I kept getting jolted out of even the bits I was liking. 

What’s good? Well, if you can make out the dialogue, which is always being swamped by other things, there’s a lot of fun there. And the characters are fun. Obviously, don’t get attached to them. It’s a Predator movie. Pretty much everyone you meet is there to get ripped apart, but they’re funny while they last. Which in some cases is surprisingly long. I counted four survivors, one of them only by inference. The other three are so obvious I don’t even feel like it’s a spoiler to announce that the last people standing are the hero, the moppet, and the feisty chick. Because of course they are. And say this for Shane Black; he can do feisty chicks. In other Predator movies the female characters are pretty much passive plot coupons, but give The Predator this much; its women may be a minority, but they’re survivors who can think for themselves.

One thing which really doesn’t work is something which should have worked. It’s a clever idea that this movie is part of the continuity of the earlier films, and that the shadowy government is getting its act together and knows at least some of what it’s up against with Predators. That’s good. But then it goes too far; the government knows things which it couldn’t possibly know. They keep referring back to things which have just happened in the movie without any witnesses at all and with no time for anyone to have tried to analyse it - not to mention that after the Predator gets loose, the analysts are so much confetti and their secret analysis base seems to be burning down around them. And yes, if the movie was going as fast as it needs to, I wouldn’t have had time to think of it.

But say this for Shane Black. We’ve seen a lot of movies lately which have been full of references of earlier better parts of the franchise, and man it’s got old fast. Black keeps most of the references fleeting, and when he rolls out a catchphrase, he makes the most of it. “Get to the choppers!” yells one of the characters, and after a cut, our motley crew of actual lunatics are on big old Harleys.