The Predator (2018)
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The Predator Movie Review
The Predator is a 2018 science fiction action film directed by Shane Black and starring Boyd Holbrook and Trevante Rhodes. It’s a mess of a movie.
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“Hey, Baxley!
If your mom’s vagina were a video game,
it’d be rated E for everyone!“
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It follows a group of PTSD-afflicted soldiers who must fight off an invading pair of Predators. This premise actually had a lot of potential, but the execution is so horrible that eventually the entire movie collapsed upon it. It starts off pretty well and admittedly the movie has its merits such as the overall strong acting from all of its talented actors and some fun sequences in dialogue and especially character interactions.
But it’s otherwise simply a mediocre flick. The plot is original, I will give them that. It is in tone somewhat similar to the first movie and in structure to the second one, but it’s never as good as the third movie as it’s not as well crafted. Originality is one thing, but the execution matters and some originality can be bad. Yes, those Predator dogs were just way too ridiculous for me to take them seriously.
The dialogue is even worse. It was absolutely atrocious at times. The movie seemed to have been written by a teenager as those lines about “pussy” in particular were so immature that they really bothered me. It just goes to show how overrated Shane Black is overall as a filmmaker. I have never liked him and that continues to be the case for me here.
Boyd Holbrook is fine as the protagonist and Jacob Tremblay is reliably good as well. He’s an interesting, memorable kid and I liked their father-son dynamic too. But all of the others are so forgettable with the exception of Olivia Munn who is memorable, but too annoying with her cool, hot scientist persona. Sterling K. Brown himself plays a silly stereotype.
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As a team, they were fun, but individually as characters, they were shortchanged. For a movie called The Predator, we do not get him almost at all. The dogs and humans get more screen time which was ludicrous. The pacing and structure is terrible and the fact that it got interesting in its last third just goes to show the horrible plot focus the movie had. It’s just a giant chaos.
The Predator is such a mess. Yes, the acting is fine across the board and it has its fun moments for sure, but the characters are underutilized, the film becomes interesting way too late in the game, the structure is horrible, Shane Black’s direction is atrocious and the humor is infantile. Also, the movie should have been called The Predator Dogs as for some puzzling reason we get more of those silly creatures than the titular alien himself.
