2018 Film Review: The Predator (2018)

Directed by: Shane Black
Written by: Shane Black, Fred Dekker
Starring: Boyd Holbrook, Olivia Munn, Jacob Tremblay
IMDb Link

The movie got butchered in the editing room.

Man, I remember being excited for this.

There's so much going on here and none of it fits together. The film seems all over the place with its tone, at once trying to be slight send-up of the original, with gore amplified to the point of silliness and even the Predator making and actual joke (one of the funniest the movie has to offer), all topped off with Shane Black's usual edgy but clever humour, and at the same time behaving as if embarassed of those traits. There are multiple loosely connected storylines that all have their own ideas about what the movie could be that then all get awkwardly mashed in to one narrative that's barely coherent and only made worse by editing so poor it's clear that there are solid chunks of the movie that are either in the wrong place or missing altogether. There's the lady scientist versus the government agency trying to study the Predators, the new take on the original with mentally ill modern soldiers instead of 80s action juggernauts, there's the continuation of ideas from Predators about multiple Predator castes that are at war over how their people do things, and then there's the story about the Predators literally weaponising autism (no, that's not a joke, in fact it's the only part of the movie that seems to be taking itself even a little seriously given the more sensitive nature of the topic, but it being handled slightly more nicely than everything else doesn't mean it was handled any better). The worst part is that none of the individual threads are bad ideas and could each on their own make for a more serviceable movie, but all of them have been thrown together in to this movie, with none of them giving any of the others any room to breathe and all them suffocating before getting a real chance to develop.

This goes for just about everything else in the movie; fun idea, but destroyed by the execution, with only a handful of scenes of genuinely good humour and spine-tingling action coming away clean. It wouldn't even be so bad if that was all the movie was, either, but the movie tries to be more, it tries to be way too much, and with such poor editing doing little to highlight the film's best aspects and hide its worst, the fun quickly turns to exhaustion.

The Short Version: Gore and excess abound, but garbage editing makes over-ambitious writing even worse, and nothing in this movie is good enough to make this any more than just okay.

Rating: 5/10

*After some time, perspective, and a few other movies, I've found that the potential I see in this movie and the love I have for the creatures, the concept, and the original, were all adding up to me rating this higher than I would for a similarly bad movie without the Predators. That said, were they not involved, this would likely be a 4/10 for me.

Published September 18th, 2018