Starring Lindsay LaVanchy, Cherami Leigh, Louis Ozawa, Rick Gonzale, Doug Cockle, Damien Haas, Lauren Holt, Jeff Leach, Pitor Michael, Andrew Morgado, Felix Solis, Britton Watkins and Michael Biehn.

Directed by Dan Trachtenberg

Hulu / Disney+

Three stories, three hunts and three killers make up the spine of this surprising, and brilliant, animated Predator feature. But there’s more meat on the bones than you expect.

‘The Shield’ opens the movie In 841, Ursa (Lindsay LaVanchy) and her son Anders (Damien Haas) track the man who killed Ursa’s father to his home and kill him. It goes well. for her, but a Predator is also hunting in the region and sees Ursa and her fleet, and her son, as a much more honourable target.

This opening segment sparks with visual flair and crunchy, brutal violence. The frozen wastes they’re battling in give the segment frequent moments of stark beauty, including clouds lit by flaming arrows and Ursa seeing the Predator from underneath the ice she’s currently drowning in. The pacing here is pleasingly chunky too, and this Predator’s signature weapon, a forcefield ‘punch’, is a nice counterpoint to Ursa’s innovative brutality wielding a pair of broken shields as a weapon., The fight is emotional, dirty and creative and Ursa’s eventual victory is seeded all the way through the segment. It feels hard fought but earned and that makes the price of the battle even harder. Ursa’s world is ugly for her, and starkly beautiful and horrifying for us. No wonder the Predator is drawn there.

As the segment closes and Ursa wins a creative but hollow victory, we see her in a spaceship holding cell. The camera pans past her to a man kneeling nearby and… we’re in 1609 in ‘The Sword’, the second story of the three. ‘The Shield’ is nordicly terse, but ‘The Sword’ is very nearly silent. Louis Ozawa plays Kenji and Kiyoshi, two brothers and the sons of a local nobleman. He orders them to duel to see who will succeed him and in the ensuing duel, Kiyoshi scars his brother who flees into the night. 20 years later, Kiyoshi is a samurai and the successor to their father. Kenji is a wandering shinobi who returns to take vengeance.

This is possibly the strongest story of the three, because the duel at its centre happens on multiple levels, both physically and thematically. The physical fight runs up and down Kiyoshi’s home and balances the grace and flow of martial arts with the different approaches the two men have taken. One on one, Kenji has an advantage because he’s had no advantages, learning to fight smart and dirty where his brother has been handed everything. Kiyoshi meanwhile is better technically but is caught up on the details of his life. Literally. There’s a great Jackie Chan-esque beat where the two men fight through and for Kiyoshi’s armour that powerfully makes the point that status and resources are elements, not solutions. Better still, as the fight closes we get a clear sense of just what Kenji wants and while he’s gone about it in the worst possible way, it’s an immensely sweet moment that defines the closing stages of the story.

The arrival of the Predator changes all that and again, the movie has a lot of fun using fighting style as a means of exploring character. The Predator Ursa faces is a brawler,

This one is an artist, using chains and blades to pull their opponents apart with offhand ease. It changes the emotional tone of the story too and the ending here manages to bring the story to a satisfying conclusion while ensuring one of the brothers at least lives to carpool with Ursa and Torres, our third protagonist.

Torres, played by Rick Gonzalez, is a US navy mechanic desperate to fly. He’s smart, talented, determined and in entirely the wrong place at the wrong time. His squadron leader Vandy (Michael Biehn) wants him right where he is, but when colleagues have their planes torn from under them, Torres is handing evidence of the extraterrestrial and a chance to fly.

This is another strong contender for favourite story. Gonzalez was a great addition to Arrow and is a likable, charming lead here. He also faces the most inventive and fun Predator yet, a partially cybernetic hunter who seems bonded with their ship and uses it to pull engines and pilots apart in mid-air. The ensuing dog fight is full of the most creative action beats in the movie and Torres’ innovative problem solving and total lack of fear earn him that last spot on the transport and give the movie one of its best visual gags.

And then we get the fourth segment, as our heroes are forced to team up having been kept in cryogenic suspension until a Predator or two gets bored. Every emotional arc comes in to land, or in Torres’ case fly, as he drags his two loner colleagues along by smashing through linguistic barriers with charm and refusal to lose. Ursa gets her family, the surviving brother gets a shot at redemption, Torres gets to fly and all of it in a huge scale action scene that ties everything off, sets up a sequel and gives us a final, tantalising hint that something bigger is coming. Fans of Prey from last year should pay close attention and with Badlands on the way shorty, there’s the slightest hint of an arc plot forming and a really fun one too.

Verdict: Killer of Killers is great. Smart, brutal, creative and stretching the franchise in the best of ways. Bring on Badlands. 10/10

Alasdair Stuart