It might be apocryphal, but I heard that the original Predator started out as a joke pitch – what would happen if E.T. fought Rambo? The Predator (the sixth iteration in the franchise) feels like five joke pitches for Predator sequels jammed into one movie. What if the Predator fought the cast of Con Air? What if the Predator fought the X-Files? What if the Predator landed in Independence Day? What if a little kid stole the Predator’s stuff? What if the Predator landed in suburbia on Halloween? The movie is a complete and total mess. However, it’s also a hell of a lot of fun.
 
Quinn McKenna (Boyd Holbrook) is an army sniper based in a South American country. After a Predator spacecraft crash lands in the middle of a mission, McKenna steals the creature’s technology, ships all the stuff back home, and goes on the run. It isn’t long before he’s captured by the shady government organization Project Stargazer, led by Sterling K. Brown. To cover up the alien incident, McKenna is sent to prison with a group of ex-military convicts who all have mental issues in one way or another. They include Keegan-Michael Key, Thomas Jane, Alfie Allen and Trevante Rhodes. Meanwhile, McKenna’s bullied, autistic son Jacob Tremblay gets the stolen Predator technology and futzes with it, just as an evolutionary biologist (Olivia Munn) is recruited by Project Stargazer to study the Predator creature recovered from the crash site. At the same time, an even BIGGER Predator comes to Earth hunting the Predator who crash landed. Eventually, all these subplots come together in gleefully R-rated carnage.
 
Simply put, there’s just way too much going on here for a 107 minute movie. It takes a solid forty-five minutes for the set up to the movie to get going, and none of that is emotional character stuff. The film cuts from one subplot to the next seemingly at random. At a certain point, you might wonder if the movie has any purpose. However, once all the plots come together, the movie works and becomes a full-tilt, gory blast.
 
From what has shambled into theaters, it seems that director and co-writer Shane Black’s original cut of The Predator was a whole lot longer and whole lot weirder. Furthermore, it seems that when Fox executives finally got a look at the original cut, they got scared because Black had likely delivered a deconstructionist take on the Predator mythos and blockbuster Hollywood sequels in general. You know, the thing Shane Black is known for? I’m assuming that faced with the original, Fox ordered reshoots and re-editing, which now feel very obvious (e.g., a major character’s death happens so quickly it barely registers).
 
The script by Black and Fred Dekker has lots of fun playing with the Predator lore, and for once in this franchise’s existence the film is not wall-to-wall callbacks to the original 1987 film. That’s a fact that Alien vs. Predator, Alien vs. Predator: Requiem, and Predators can’t claim. There are a few callbacks, but they’re few and far between. I just wish that the script would have settled down and picked one story to tell instead of five.
 
Black’s direction is very good. His action scenes have a nice pace to them, but again, with a movie this overstuffed, everything runs way too fast, and at times feels like an over-caffeinated fourteen year-old reading you his Predator script.     
 
The cast across the board is great; the rapport between Holbrook and the ex-cons, in particular, is a lot of fun. Tremblay’s work here is very good as Rory, and it’s cool for a big franchise sci-fi movie to make an autistic kid the hero. Olivia Munn is also very good, but her character is a little thin, and I suspect most of her character development was left on the cutting room floor. Sterling K. Brown chews every single bit of scenery, and he’s a joy – as I’ve said before I’d watch Brown read the phone book. But again, this feels like a three-hour movie that was hacked down to the bone, and a lot of the emotional character stuff seems to be what went missing.
 
On the whole, The Predator is a lot of fun…as long as you can get through those first forty-five minutes. The film ends with the promise of a sequel, but considering the controversy surrounding the movie, with Shane Black hiring a convicted sex offender for a scene and not telling anyone about it (the scene was ultimately cut), I doubt a sequel will be made. So, here’s my joke pitch for a Predator sequel – get Sigourney Weaver and Arnold Schwarzenegger to reprise their iconic roles from the Alien franchise and the original Predator, and make a big Alien vs. Predator franchise blow out. Actually, that’s not so stupid…Fox, call me!
 
Two and a half out of four stars.