Boyd Holbrook

(On Cable TV, May 2019) Shane Black is far too good a writer-director to completely turn out a bad movie, but The Predator is his worst yet. It still does have flashes of humour and mildly inventive action, but it does struggles and succumb to the creative fatigue of a series either four or six films long at this point. Despite inventing new enemies, new motivations and changing the shape of the plot every fifteen minutes or so, The Predator can’t quite manage to get out of its predecessors’ shadow. Which is curious, because it’s probably the second-best film of the series (largely on account of the others not being particularly good). Black’s worst instinct can work against him at times—the film has its number of puzzling plot developments, far too much gore, lines that fall flat due to overreach and an infuriating amount of technobabble: not only is it too happy to bluntly equate autism with super-smartness (sigh), it doubles down on its idiocy by claiming that autism could be a next stage of human evolution. There’s a plot reason for that, mind you (summed up: “Predators want autistic braiiins”), but it’s still an incredibly moronic claim. Black has a long experience as an action screenwriter and it shows best in the small beats of his action scenes, but he often loses focus: there are too many characters and his sequences could be sharpened by forgoing some extraneous elements. The ensemble ennui isn’t helped by hit-and-miss actors—I could watch Olivia Munn all day at any time, but Boyd Holbrook isn’t charismatic enough in the lead role. Many of the ensemble cast are good actors with little to do, although it is cool to see Jake Busey show up briefly. The SF plot devices are weak, the action is uneven, but the film is on slightly more solid footing with its dialogue, occasionally being self-aware enough to be effective even in the middle of dodgy plot developments. I watched the film falter in between flashes of humour and wit, smothered by a surprising boredom at seeing pretty much exactly what the predator series has already done. That The Predator does better at exactly the same things that previous films in the series is only a half-success. It would be time to retire the concept, except that the film is meant to be the first reboot of a new series. So it goes today, with once-promising concept being ground down in overfamiliarity even when the results are half-competent.