I’m not a fan of 1987’s Predator (give me 2010’s Predators any day), but I’ll take it over The Predator, a curiously sloppy attempt to resuscitate the on-again, off-again franchise, this time courtesy of co-writer and director Shane Black (The Nice Guys, Iron Man 3, and a supporting player in the original film). Black first made his name as an action-comedy screenwriting specialist (Lethal Weapon), so it’s surprising that this is so poorly constructed in terms of character development and basic narrative (the co-writer is Fred Dekker). The movie spends its first section awkwardly converging three story threads involving a biologist (Olivia Munn), a sniper (Boyd Holbrook), and the sniper’s son, who has autism (Jacob Tremblay). The rest of the film then combines them in a fairly nonsensical plot. Holbrook—a Garrett Hedlund-Charlie Hunnam hybrid—at least delivers the tough-guy one-liners Black specializes in with the right combination of sincerity and bemusement (even better is Sterling K. Brown as a government agent). But in the mouths of pretty much everyone else in the cast—including Trevante Rhodes, Thomas Jane, and Keegan-Michael Key—the dialogue falls flat. (Poor Munn is also required to speak in ironic hard-assery, for reasons I couldn’t discern.) What about the Predator itself, you might ask? Black has tried to inject some life into the franchise by setting much of The Predator in government laboratories and suburban streets, but in taking the alien out of the jungle, he loses much of the creature’s mystique. Walking around under the fluorescent lighting of an elementary school, the Predator looks less like an interplanetary killer and more like a dad visiting his kids’ class in cosplay.
