Directed by Shane Black. Written by Black and Fred Dekker. Starring Boyd Holbrook, Jacob Tremblay, Olivia Munn, Trevante Rhodes, Keegan-Michael Key, Thomas Jane, Alfie Allen, Augusto Aguilera, Sterling K. Brown, Niall Matter and Jake Busey.
Plot: the Predators track some of their own equipment to Earth and a team of troubled soldiers and a scientist have to fight them off.
A Predator ship crashes on Earth and attacks U.S. Army Ranger Quinn McKenna (Holbrook) and his team. Only Quinn makes it out of the fight alive. Stupidly, he sends some of a deceased Predator’s armor to his house where his autistic son, Rory (Tremblay), receives the package and starts playing with the armor. Quinn is then captured by government agent, Will Traeger (Brown), who knows the Predators exist and wants more information about them from Quinn. Will also brings Casey Bracket (Munn), an evolutionary biologist, to this government facility so that she can examine a sedated Predator and study it’s DNA.
Will puts Quinn on a bus with several other soldiers/prisoners who call themselves “loonies”. And when the sedated Predator wakes up because he hasn’t been sedated enough, he kills most everyone and escapes the facility. Casey goes after him and eventually ends up with the loonies. Since Quinn figures the Predator is going after his armor now, he takes Casey and the other loonies to find Rory.
Before the movie ends you’ve got a bigger, badder Predator in the picture, a kidnapping, a firefight, several explosions and a sacrificial death. But none of it is good and none of it adds anything to the movie overall. The effects are decent, is was funny in parts and the cast was good, although sometimes they were severely miscast. For instance, Olivia Munn as a scientist was a reach, but to make her into a ninja scientist was just ridiculous. And the humor was okay when the movie started, but by the end it had gotten really old. The whole script had become terrible really, with all it’s cocky banter. How many times does the average person actually say the word ‘fuck’?
As for the characters, I didn’t like most of them and DJ didn’t like anyone at all. The direction was also horrible as the movie had no smoothness to it. Too many things were uneven. Take the innovation, which we would’ve called good if not for the fact that the Predator had ample opportunity to kill Quinn and didn’t. The Predator killed several other people with an, almost literal, wave of his hand, but he just tossed Quinn around a bit eventually allowing Quinn to gain the upper hand. In short, we almost hated the whole movie and therefore cannot recommend.
Our score: 24.
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