Review of The Predator (2018) by Acidworm — 16 Aug 2022

This time a Predator is captured, and held at some military research lab, and of course it escapes as the scientists don’t restrain him properly. Then the movie plays out like John Carpenter’s Halloween where they all drive around town searching for the Predator on Halloween with all the kids out trick or treating, and then they send in incompetent government agents.

The script doesn’t make much sense with a lot of continuity errors, and I don’t know if it is due to a problem with poor editing, but it feels quite disjointed in places. The scientist in one scene finds out who the sniper was that had first contact with the Predator, but then she is running for her life, and meets the sniper and says she already read his file. Like, no she didn’t. She never even had a chance to see it. At another point the group of misfit service members, which they refer to themselves as the loonies are in a woman’s house, and then you see them spread out in various vehicles driving around town including a police car with the sirens going. Like, what? Or later when they randomly show up at the perfect time with a News helicopter. Where did they get the vehicles from? They also magically have a lot of military grade firearms including grenade launchers, assault rifles with silencers, and mp5s. Yet they never had access to any of it. When a Predator says he is hunting them then the groups of people that were killing each other suddenly became allies without any hesitancy whatsoever, which was ridiculous. Oh, and the Scientist lady turned out to have special forces combat skills, which also was not believable.

Some of the deductions like from the military intelligence officer who deduced what the Predators were doing was too far-fetched. No way he could have deduced all that on the info he had, but serves as a lazy way for exposition. The Scientist who figures out what the Predators are up to on each planet by just looking at their blood in a microscope is also crazy far-fetched. No way she could deduce that. Also serves as exposition, and there were other moments equally as far-fetched. The young kid with autism who liked around 9 was also some kind of genius at being able to immediately know how to use the alien technology. This didn’t make any sense.

A VA facility would not be where they take the Predator to conduct tests, and the security would have been much better since they know they have an alien that is very deadly with a lot of strength as they make references to the Predators in previous movies. They know what they are capable of. It is also highly convenient that the soldier that makes first contact with the alien happens to be in the same VA facility. Not to mention, how convenient it was that the soldier was on a secret mission to rescue hostages in the jungle where the alien’s escape pod happened to land just as he was about to engage in his mission.

The movie has a lot of tonal problems too. It seems like it is meant to be a sci-fi action horror, which makes sense, but it also tries to be a comedy at times, and the attempts at humor feels so out of place, and cringe. I can’t tell if it is trying to be an intentional satire or not. The group of misfit soldiers are terribly out of place with one guy with tourettes as if he is meant to be the comic relief, and their interactions with one another is just irritating with some slapstick comedy. The scientist that joins them also seems to act out of character at times in a very disjointed way.

And, the CGI was not a good idea for the Predator, and looks like they were jumping on the Marvel bandwagon. The acting was pretty poor apart from the lead guy, and woman whom were decent and some of the action sequences were decent, but not much else.