The Predator

[Bad Ambassador]

I think September was chosen as its less competitive for bigger movies, and also It was a major smash at the same time last year, which showed that the right film can break through even then.

[Bogbrainedmurphy]

Didn't know there was one. Will have a look for it.

Just finished it, I've read the majority of the Predator novels and this is one of the most enjoyable, for me. The Predator is absolutely brutal in this one too.

The author uses to word "hell" as an exclamation far too much, but other than that I liked it.

[samadriel]

https://youtu.be/ruMLUFmSO4k
Predator retrospective from Red Letter Media.

[St_Eddie]

Final trailer.

Still looks awful to me.  At least it's a hard R, I guess.  There's some decent brutality on display, amongst the endless and cringe-inducing attempts at chucklesome bro-dude comedy.

[mothman]

That feels a bit more coherent to me, as a trailer.

[Blumf]

Yeah, just nothing really interesting.

[St_Eddie]

Yeah, just nothing really interesting.

Oh, I don't know.  I found it interesting that the kid character was nowhere to be seen in this latest (and longest) trailer.  A reaction to the negative feedback from the first trailer, no doubt but I wonder if his role has been significantly cut back in the final edit of the movie itself.  He certainly had a significant role, with lots of screen time, in the leaked script.

[goinggoinggone]

I see nothing in this new trailer that seperates it from the likes of Deadpool or any other kind of meta-heavy would be blockbuster.

[mothman]

Well, no. Were you expecting that? From a Predator movie?

[goinggoinggone]

It would be nice not to see such a reliance on C.G.I blood.  I don't know why still put myself through these expectations, but I always hope to see more practical effects.

[St_Eddie]

Well, no. Were you expecting that? From a Predator movie?

I think that the issue is that the trailer suggests more of a MCU type of movie, with every other line of dialogue being a meta quip, which serves to undercut the chance for genuine tension.  Alternatively (and more accurately), you could say that it's a Shane Black type of movie, which leads me to think that Black was probably best off sticking to being in front of the camera, when it comes to Predator movies.

Note that Black's sole confirmed writing contribution to the original Predator was the 'pussy' gag (yet, people wrongly continue to credit him as being the "co-writer" to this day.  Something which even Black himself denies).  This new movie seems to be an entire movie full of gags like that, which isn't really what I want from a Predator flick.

It would be nice not to see such a reliance on C.G.I blood.  I don't know why still put myself through these expectations, but I always hope to see more practical effects.

Amen to that.

[mothman]

That's my point. GGG said this didn't look different to any other recent blockbuster, and my thought was, why would it? It's the fourth or, arguably, sixth in a (long-running, not that it matters) franchise that has been tailored to appeal to Hollywood's sole target demographic, 14 to 24 year old males. Were we meant to expect some philosophical art movie in which an inexplicably French-accented Predator smokes Gauloises and muses on "ze threel of ze 'eunt?" Though I do now want to see that film.

[St_Eddie]

That's my point. GGG said this didn't look different to any other recent blockbuster, and my thought was, why would it? It's the fourth or, arguably, sixth in a (long-running, not that it matters) franchise that has been tailored to appeal to Hollywood's sole target demographic, 14 to 24 year old males. Were we meant to expect some philosophical art movie in which an inexplicably French-accented Predator smokes Gauloises and muses on "ze threel of ze 'eunt?"

Well no but something more in the style of Predator or Predator 2 would be appreciated.  It's not as though those movies took themselves all that seriously but it's still a case of degrees.  Judging by the trailer, this movie is yet another Hollywood chucklefest.  Sick of it.

[Blumf]

If Hollywood loves prequels so much, then do Predator * Apocalypto:- A Mayan (or Aztec, whatever!) tribe get hunted. Old vagina face leaves his projectile weapons behind, not sporting. Lots of running, stabbing, and punching.

[Kelvin]

I think it looks okay, certainly the most personality of any of the Predator (And AvP) films post 2. Feels like it's trying a slightly new tone, which might help it stand out in the series, I suppose. Whether it's good matters more than whether it's faithful to, or in the style of, the originals.

All that said, it doesn't actually look very good. Just not as bland as previous efforts. Predator Dog and MEGA PREDATOR look particularly eye rolling.

[Glebe]

Much better than the previous shit trailers, but I wouldn't expect too much.

[bgmnts]

The little head-to-head adverts on sky sports, like its a pay per view fight, are fucking dreadful things

[Bogbrainedmurphy]

Read/listened to a couple of early reviews from the fan sites that are suggesting a pretty enjoyable, funny, gory, daft romp for the majority of the film. But then a lore killing ending which sounds like someone taking the piss. I'll white it out...




The "fugitive" predator is actually on the run from its own kind as it is carrying a gift to the human race which will help us in an upcoming war against the Predators, as they intend to colonise earth now global warming has made it a more attractive place to live. This pod shows up at the end and out pops, no not Schwarzenegger, but a drone thing that attaches itself to someone's arm and becomes a full on mecha-predator armour suit, complete with metal dreadlocks. And this is the set-up for a sequel. Fucking hell.

[Bazooka]

Looks like a piece of intestine, yet instead of being shot through a flaming hoop for a bonfire spectacular, is instead blasted through the numbskullery of a rotting idiot. 1 Bag of Popcorn and a tin of bad bread.

[monolith]

Read/listened to a couple of early reviews from the fan sites that are suggesting a pretty enjoyable, funny, gory, daft romp for the majority of the film. But then a lore killing ending which sounds like someone taking the piss. I'll white it out...




*spoiler*

If that's real then there's no fucking way in hell I am watching this film.

[SteveDave]

If Hollywood loves prequels so much, then do Predator * Apocalypto:- A Mayan (or Aztec, whatever!) tribe get hunted. Old vagina face leaves his projectile weapons behind, not sporting. Lots of running, stabbing, and punching.

Or have him go back to where he gets the gun that he gives to Danny Glover at the end of Predator 2.

[St_Eddie]

*spoiler*

This film sounds amazing!  On a completely unrelated note, I'm utterly brain-dead.

Nymphum goo-gadda (that's predator speak for 'doodadum shoo-shasm').

[goinggoinggone]

I'm too frightened to read the white ink... guess I'll go and see it next week and complain about it here.

[St_Eddie]

Shane Black has issued a statement following the revelation by the Los Angeles Times that he hired a registered sex offender to star in a brief scene in "The Predator." 20th Century Fox edited out all scenes featuring actor Steven Wilder Striegel after "Predator" star Olivia Munn discovered and shared with Fox that Striegel is a registered sex offender. The actor plead guilty in 2010 after being accused of luring a 14-year-old girl into a sexual relationship on the internet.
Read More:Shane Black Cast Registered Sex Offender in 'The Predator,' Fox Edited Out Actor After Olivia Munn Discovered the News

Striegel and Black are friends and knew each other five years prior to the actor's 2009 arrest. Striegel served six months in jail after pleading guilty to risk of injury to a child and enticing a minor by computer. Black also cast the actor in "Iron Man 3" and "The Nice Guys" following his release from prison. Striegel's appearance in "The Predator" was a brief three-page scene in which he starred as a jogger hitting on Munn.

Black issued a statement through his publicist and revealed the Times article informed him of new details regarding Striegel's conviction that he previously didn't know.

"Having read this morning's news reports, it has sadly become clear to me that I was misled by a friend I really wanted to believe was telling me the truth when he described the circumstances of his conviction," Black's new statement reads. "I believe strongly in giving people second chances – but sometimes you discover that chance is not as warranted as you may have hoped."

"After learning more about the affidavit, transcripts and additional details surrounding Steve Striegel's sentence, I am deeply disappointed in myself," the director continued. "I apologize to all of those, past and present, I've let down by having Steve around them without giving them a voice in the decision."

Munn reported the news about Striegel to Fox on August 15. Studio executives made the quick decision to remove the actor from the movie. A Fox spokesperson told the Times the studio was "not aware of Mr. Striegel's background when he was hired."

Black was originally quoted in the Times story saying he "personally chose to help a friend" when he decided to cast Striegel in "The Predator." "I can understand others might disapprove, as his conviction was on a sensitive charge and not to be taken lightly," he said.

Also from IndieWire; their review...

Perhaps the best thing that can be said about "The Predator" is that, at times, you can appreciate what Shane Black was trying to accomplish. A noble but profoundly botched attempt to crossbreed an '80s action movie with contemporary franchise sensibilities, "The Predator" wants to take what's old and make it new again. By the gutless standards of current studio filmmaking, that practically makes the film a mad science experiment. But this miserable chimera — skinned with Black's wicked sense of humor, but too underdeveloped to survive on its wits alone — should never have been let out of the lab, as it poses a serious threat of boring people to death.

Arriving more than 30 years since Arnold Schwarzenegger first rumbled in the jungle with the ugliest hunter in the galaxy, "The Predator" channels the kind of muscular schlock you might have rented on VHS from your local video store. It's full of ultra-violence, driven by testosterone, and scattered with those chintzy old explosions that erupted in welding sparks instead of actual fire. At the same time, it also aims to satisfy modern audiences (and studio executives) by offering an overdose of special effects (brace yourself for Preda-dogs), a mercenary franchise mentality, and an eclectic cast of today's most exciting actors.

On one hand, "The Predator" is such an unapologetic appeal to the teenage delinquents who once made Shane Black the highest-paid screenwriter in Hollywood that it might as well have been called "To All the Boys I've Loved Before" (case in point: Keegan-Michael Key's character communicates almost exclusively through "your mom" jokes). On the other hand, all but the best gags feel like they've been focus-tested to death, the nonsense plot has been ruthlessly engineered to lay the groundwork for a sequel, and the film's half-assed efforts to reclassify cognitive disabilities as superpowers — however well-intentioned — come off as misguided at best, and dishonest at worst.

"The Predator" begins in outer space, as an alien spaceship tries to outrun the bogeys on his tail before warping into Earth's atmosphere and crashing into the Mexican jungle (it goes without saying that this will not be the last overt nod to the original film). It's bad timing for rugged Army Ranger Quinn McKenna (a bland, serviceable Boyd Holbrook), who's right in the middle of trying to snipe a few drug lords. After surviving a short tussle with the dread-locked E.T. who pops out of the downed craft, Quinn salvages a bit of nifty alien technology and mails it north to America, because our country apparently doesn't have enough problems already.

The package finds its way to Quinn's autistic son Rory (Jacob Tremblay), who's more comfortable with alien gadgets than he is with human beings. It's awful to watch the bullies in the boy's class refer to him as "ass-burger," but fear not: Rory will have his revenge when he wears the Predator mask to go trick-or-treating, and his developmental disorder seems to magically clear up as soon as it's no longer relevant to the story.

For better or worse, however, he's hardly the only character in the movie to be struggling with some kind of mental issue. After Quinn is interrogated by a ruthless government operative named Will Traeger (a scene-stealing Sterling K. Brown, who finds beautiful music in lines like "they're large, they're fast, and fucking you up is their idea of tourism"), he's thrown into a bus full of other "crazy" vets the Army has deemed to be liabilities.

There's something a bit off about each and every one of these violent rejects, and Black loves them for their foibles. "Moonlight" breakout Trevante Rhodes is genuinely fantastic as Nebraska Williams (birth name: "Gaylord." Pause for laughter), an ex-marine with a penchant for self-harm. Key brings a homicidal sense of humor to the role of Coyle, while Augusto Aguilera expresses his character's PTSD through acting really high, and Thomas Jane is saddled with a classic case of Movie Tourette's. Alfie Allen is British.

Black's comic instincts have never struggled to keep up with the times ("Kiss Kiss Bang Bang" inflected Raymond Chandler with a withering degree of sarcasm, while "Iron Man 3" afforded Tony Stark all of his best material), but most of the jokes here feel like they're several decades past their expiration dates. "The Predator" bends over backwards to contort weaknesses into strengths, but there's really no coming back from the bit where biologist Casey Bracket (Olivia Munn) deadpans that autism is actually the next step in human evolution.

It's hard to say why Bracket, of all people, was called in for the most top-secret job in military history, but she's pretty, she's smart, and apparently — when she was six years old — she wrote a letter to the President expressing her interest in meeting an alien. Don't hold your breath for Black's script (co-written with Fred Dekker) to undercut that line with a more believable rationale, because you'll asphyxiate and die before the scene where Bracket survives a run-in with a Predator by getting completely naked on the floor of a shower.

At least the movie doesn't leer at her in the process. As compromised as this misbegotten project is, "The Predator" refuses to reduce its female lead to a sex object; Bracket is basically the most competent of all the characters, even if the best scenes in the film takes place after she shoots herself in the foot with a tranquilizer dart, leaving Quinn's unit to take care of her like they're the seven dwarfs. In fact, the only body that gets ogled here is that of the massive Predator who shows up to chase the runaway we met in the prologue, the camera drinking up every slimy inch of this towering extra-terrestrial Adonis.

Apparently, these killer space invaders are injecting themselves with the strongest DNA they can find as part of a ruthless bid to keep getting stronger and conquer new worlds. It's an under-explained process that Black's film hopes to replicate for itself, as it builds on the franchise's core genetic sequence with bits that it borrows from Marvel, "Alien," and whatever else Black can slip into its bloodstream.

The result is a tedious ordeal that strains towards a deeper story that it never bothers to flesh out, and winks at a pre-existing mythology that it only thinks of as fan service. Yes, someone says "get to the chopper." No, it's not amusing. Yes, someone references alien visits in 1987, 1997, and alludes to the fact that they've started to occur more frequently (okay, that dig against the "Alien vs. Predator" movies is actually kinda funny). No, those hints of self-reflexivity never take hold.

Despite a handful of ingenious kills, "The Predator" doesn't feel like a throwback that's stitching the past into the present — it feels like a confused and desperate reboot that's totally lost in time. For a film about celebrating the things that make people different, it's a shame that Shane Black's latest studio offering feels like it could have been made by committee, and that it probably was.

Grade: D+ - You can see what Shane Black was going for with his latest Hollywood sequel, but this compromised mess is the first bad film of his career.

...the film's half-assed efforts to reclassify cognitive disabilities as superpowers — however well-intentioned — come off as misguided at best, and dishonest at worst.

This was the worst aspect of the leaked script.  Fucking Derek 2.0.

[goinggoinggone]

Yeah... watching this is gonna be... troubling.

[kidsick5000]

To sneak in hiring a convicted sex offender friend is bad enough.
To put him in a scene where he's hitting on women is either arrogance or stupidity or both.
But to have that scene with the lead actress? Who has previously been public with her own Me Too incident?

Where the hell was his brain?

[bgmnts]

That's gloriously shambolic.

[St_Eddie]

A snippet from the Uproxx review...

Which brings me to maybe the worst thing I have seen in a film this year. The aforementioned son, Rory, played by Tremblay, is the kind of Hollywood autistic character whose disorder is played as a superpower. I'm not exaggerating when I say that his disability — which causes him to fear dogs and loud noises and also enables him to read alien language because autism = really smart — is literally treated as if it's "the next step in human evolution," a line that Olivia Munn says in the film, and a plot point that becomes important later on when the Predators' true plan is revealed. Considering the number of eyes that read a script before a movie is ever financed, I am appalled that many people looked at this idea and said, "Sure, that sounds cool, go for it." I can't even do the film the favor of calling its portrayal of mental disorders "misguided." In the year 2018, when our understanding of the mind is better than it's ever been and our portrayal of mental illness in pop culture is growing more empathetic by the day, what ends up in The Predator is something that a lot of people will likely find disgusting.

[Default to the negative]

The aforementioned son, Rory, played by Tremblay, is the kind of Hollywood autistic character whose disorder is played as a superpower. I'm not exaggerating when I say that his disability — which causes him to fear dogs and loud noises and also enables him to read alien language because autism = really smart — is literally treated as if it's "the next step in human evolution,"

Straight out of the Stephen King manual.

[bgmnts]

Straight out of the Stephen King manual.

Is autistic magic child a Stephen King trope I was unaware of?