The Predator is More of a Sports Hunter

The Predator (2018)

The Predator was a fun action movie that served no purpose and came out at the perfect time of year. It is the ideal late-summer mini-blockbuster to transition close out the summer of big budget action films and lead into marginally scary horror films. The movie tried to have a message, but nobody cared, not even the actors or the writers. It was pure action movie schlock. The Predator was Shane Black’s love letter to 1980s and 1990s action movies. It was big, loud, and pretty with an unreasonable amount of humor for the situation. I did enjoy the humor, but real people wouldn’t be ending every sentence with a quip when they are being hunted by a ten-foot alien with armor, active camouflage, and a thousand ways to kill them. It was essentially the Iron Man 3 of the Predator series; it wasn’t terrible but was worse than the first two (ignoring AvP and Predators) and it also tried really hard to be funny, which demolished any message and undercut any character growth. The actors were fine. Only Keegan-Michael Key and Thomas Jane’s relationship was given any detail, and Sterling K. Brown used his super cool, dulcet voice to distract the viewer from how poorly written the dialogue was. The Predator certainly wasn’t a good movie, but it was the type of movie that I needed to see at that moment in my life, so it has an inflated score of 4 out of 6 mentally unstable veterans pushed aside by the system.