The Predator (2018) Review

"I had a run-in with a space alien."

-Quinn McKenna

During a mission, Army Ranger Quinn McKenna (Boyd Holbrook) witness a spaceship crash.  Onboard is a Predator (Brian A. Prince) who proceeds to kill McKenna's entire team, but he escapes with pieces of the Predator's armor and mails it to his family's home before being captured along with the Predator.  Of course, the Predator manages to escape and goes after McKenna's family, so he recruits a group of ex-soldiers who are suffering from PTSD to defeat the alien and the government group wanting to eliminate anyone who witnessed the events.

What Works:

Basically every single character in this film is comic-relief, which isn't a good thing, but the constant stream of jokes churns out a good one every so often.  They get fewer and fewer as the movie goes on, but there a few really funny moments in the film.

For the most part, the action is solid and we get a few decent kills throughout the film.  Almost anytime the Predator was on screen, I was happy.  Plus, we have Jake Busey in a minor role, a fun nod to the second film where his father, Gary Busey, was one of the main characters.

What Sucks:

Cards on the table, I hated this movie.  As I mentioned above, every character in this movie was comic relief.  This does not match the tone of any of the other Predator movies.  It felt more like a comedy than a sci-fi or a horror film.  Every character is constantly quipping, but most of the one-liners aren't good.  It really feels like a 12-year-old wrote this movie.

Surprisingly, the Predator isn't actually in that much of the movie.  There are only about four action sequences in the whole film.  We spend way too much time with these crappy characters and not enough time with the one thing we're here to see.

The CGI doesn't look great either.  I almost wonder if it was intentionally bad.  In this day in age, a big budget movie with bad CGI is unacceptable.  When we did have the practical Predator on screen it was awesome, but most of it was a computer-generated travesty.

On paper, the characters in this movie should be fairly well developed.  Most of them are former soldiers with PTSD for one reason or another.  But, beyond that, they never get much development.  They aren't interesting in the slightest and as they got killed off, I felt nothing.  This is pretty similar to the original movie, but in the original the characters weren't annoying. 

Minor Spoilers Ahead!

But the biggest problem of all is this movie tries to add some motivation behind why the Predators go hunting on Earth.  More specifically, why they rip out the spins of their tougher foes.  In the previous films, they took the spines and skulls as trophies of particularly worthy adversaries and that's what makes the Predators so cool.  They have some honer and respect for those they fight.  In this movie, it's revealed they take DNA from the spines of their toughest foes to upgrade themselves.  It's incredibly stupid and tarnishes the reputation of probably the coolest aliens in all of sci-fi.

Verdict:

The Predator is by far the worst movie in the series and is disappointing on nearly every lever.  There are a few funny jokes and some solid sequences with the Predator, but the characters suck, most of the jokes completely fail, the script feels like a middle-schooler wrote it, the CGI isn't great, and they tarnish the reputation of the Predators.  This is one of the worst movies I have seen this year I'm extremely disappointed. 

 2/10: Awful