The Predator franchise is an exceedingly eclectic collection of films. Whether you’re in the mood a quintessential ‘80s action movies, a grungy ‘90s police thriller, a kitschy monster mash-up, or even a hyper-stylized animated anthology, the series has you covered. But amidst all the various nooks and crannies that the franchise has occupied, each of which seems to have its own little subsection of fans, there is one installment that had been widely derided since its release and continues to be spoken about as the bane of the series to this day: the 2018 entry, The Predator. The film received abysmal reviews upon release, flopped at the box office, and ultimately would have put the entire series on-ice were it not for director Dan Trachtenberg sending his own pitch into 20th Century Studios, which would become the breakout sensation, Prey.
But I have to be honest with you: as someone who was literally there in the theater on opening night in 2018, I kind of loved The Predator from the outset. It’s an absolutely bonkers film and one where it isn’t really difficult to see the various elements that chafed franchise fans’ sensibilities, but as a longtime Predator fan, I found The Predator to be a hooting-and-hollering good time when it released, and very much still do.
One of the issues many people take with The Predator is its overall tone. Fans who entered the sequel hoping for a straightforward take on the franchise were ultimately disappointed. After all, it had been eight years since the previous installment (2010’s Predators), so again, it's easy to understand why fans who didn’t jive with the sensibilities of this film would’ve felt badly burned by it after such a long wait.
However, I think part of that is a contextual issue. Directed by Shane Black, a lot of the marketing leading up to the release of The Predator was preoccupied with selling it as a return to form. Black had, after all, been both an actor and an uncredited writer on the original 1987 John McTiernan film, so it made sense to lean into those links.
However, in the decades since that film, Black had blossomed into a far more idiosyncratic and deranged (highly complimentary) filmmaker. He wrote and directed films like Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and The Nice Guys, both of which are obscenely funny action films that blend dark humor with gonzo, tactile action and larger-than-life characters. Even his previous entry into a big budget franchise, Iron Man 3, saw him gleefully subverting expectations and ruffling more than few feathers in the process. I say this to say, a lot of fans went into The Predator with Predator as their reference point, when in reality, the closest analog and best primer for Black’s sequel is something like The Monster Squad.
Written by Black and Fred Dekker, The Monster Squad (1987) was an irreverent take on Universal’s stable of movie monsters, that went on to become a cult classic. It has a distinctly midnight movie kind of energy to it, and it’s the exact same kind of vibe that Black and Dekker brought to their first collaboration since then, The Predator. It’s a film that opens with a serial-esque in-media-res space chase, prominently features a Haunted Mansion gag, and has Yautjas running around suburban streets on Halloween; it’s a very pulpy, goofy film, and you either get on its wavelength early on or you’re not going to have a good time with it.
A frequent complaint levied The Predator is its handling of autism as a plot device. In the movie, Jacob Tremblay’s character of Rory McKenna is a young boy with autism, and it is ultimately revealed by the film’s end that the Yautja are after his DNA because it exhibits positive attributes they are looking to experiment with. Is that stupid? Absolutely. But, as a counterargument, I will point out that there’s more than a little bit of Black’s own personal struggles wrapped within this story thread. While he was making The Predator, Black was diagnosed with Tourette’s syndrome, which results in both a joke-character in the movie having it so that he can make deliberate fun of it, and in this autism-centered arc. When looking at it through this lens, its apparent that this is Black working through his own feelings on being defined by his diagnosis, and I ultimately find it to be a pretty sweet little note of endearment, especially in the context of recent politically-minded discourse surrounding autism.
Another complaint is that the editing is a mess, but I don’t find that to be true at all. Prior to the film’s release, it was well-known that it had undergone extensive reshoots. I think that bled into a lot of people’s perception of the film itself, giving it a bit of a negative stigma, especially in regard to the editing.
However, I think that editors Harry B. Miller III and Billy Weber did a pretty bang-up job with it, crafting a real sense of propulsion and staying in lock-step with Black’s very distinct sense of pacing and delivery. The final act moves at such a ludicrous and breakneck pace that there are entire major character deaths that happen in a matter of frames, but I honestly kind of love that about the movie; it’s this insane roller coaster ride and by the end, things are whipping by so fast that it lends this experiential cinema-of-attraction verve to it.
The cast is altogether great, the action is routinely enthralling, and it just feels like a true-blue Shane Black midnight creature feature set in the Predator universe in the best of ways. Having said all of that, I will concede that film’s final scene (which teases potential sequels) is awful. However, it is worth noting that both Black and Dekker have made it clear they also hate the scene, and that it was forced upon them by the studio after extensive test screenings. On opening night, in the theater I was in, the lights came up before the scene was even finished, effectively communicating ‘this isn’t really part of the movie,’ and I think that was the best thing that could have happened.
For many people, this final scene leaves such a bad taste in their mouth that they retroactively look back poorly upon the whole thing. But if you just turn the film off after its actual ending proper and skip that tacked-on scene, you’ll be surprised how much it improves the viewing experience. It’s an atonal and whiplash-inducing teaser that doesn’t belong in the film, and isn’t indicative of Black’s movie as a whole. If you go back to it with an open mind, especially amidst the raging success of Trachtenberg’s modern films which do deliver the more straightforward kind of experience many fans were looking for, I promise you that The Predator is a rip-roaring good time at the movies with more heart and integrity than you remember.