Starring Boyd Holbrook, Trevante Rhodes, Jacob Tremblay, Olivia Munn, Stirling K Brown, Keegan-Michael Key

Directed by Shane Black

Warner Bros., out now

US Army sniper Quinn Mckenna must unite a bunch of misfit soldiers with mental health issues and a scientist out of her depth to take on the galaxy’s ultimate killer. But this time, the fight is about more than personal survival.

There’s an odd tension at the heart of The Predator, which basically boils down to the fact that the movie has something of an identity crisis going on. From its opening scene through to the rolling of the final credits, it dances around being many things – a serious entry in the ongoing Predator franchise; a tongue in cheek, rib-nudging parody of that same franchise; a gratuitously schlocky horror piece; a comedy; and a sci-fi action movie. What it never demonstrates – ironically – is any basic understanding of what made the original Predator work.

You see, Predator had a lot of elements to it which were similar. It took itself very seriously in tone, but it was also peppered with subtle references to the fact of its own ridiculousness, as well as one not-so-subtle one in the form of a closing credits reel that looked like something from a family comedy. It had moments of (often black) humour, but with one exception (‘stick around’) they never undercut the tension of the story. It had gruesome depictions of bloody slaughter, but they were used to reinforce the genuine terror of the protagonists of what they were facing, rather than as some sort of glorified money shot of gore and viscera.

Lacking McTiernan’s subtlety, Black assembles a film which is tonally all over the place, going from laugh out loud one-liners to overly earnest science fiction via viciously cynical nastiness. It never settles on any particular path for very long, with the result that it fails to engage the audience because they never quite know what it is the movie wants from them.

That lack of subtlety is on display in other ways as well, not the least of which are actual subtitles for Predator dialogue. Previous entries in the franchise – even the risible AvP – relied on expression, posture and gestures to convey meaning from the intergalactic hunters. Here, we just get Predator symbols appearing on the screen and then changing before us into English. Any sense of the creature being alien, unknowable, mysterious is lost as we are told exactly what they are saying (and what they are saying is depressingly banal).

I saw the 3D IMAX showing, so it’s possible that the slightly increased darkness of that format was a contributory factor, but a lot of the movie takes place at night, and action scenes are often correspondingly shrouded, forcibly calling to mind the same trick used in Requiem. In that film though, this was a trick used to hide a low budget from a studio that had little faith in the product. Here, it’s just unforgivable.

Frustratingly, there are moments where the film actually achieves a bit of self-awareness – one exchange in particular on the nature of the creatures and the misnomer of their name is bordering on a profound comment on the franchise as a whole, but then Stirling K Brown’s Traeger gets in another crass, profanity-laden response and the movie sinks back into its general milieu once again, all traces of self-awareness wiped away.

As far as the cast goes, the movie criminally wastes almost all of them. Of the soldiers, the only memorable characters are Key’s Coyle and Thomas Jane’s Baxley, a slightly endearing double act with a genuinely fascinating backstory which never gets much investigation by the script, which is too busy lining up the next gore shot or profanity. The rest are a bland assemblage of cliché including lead McKenna, whose main value to the plot is being the father of Rory, one of Hollywood’s more egregious uses of the ‘magic autistic’ cliché.

Billed by the movie as having Aspergers, Rory seems to cycle through dominant characteristics of various parts of the Autism spectrum dependent on what the movie needs him to do at any given point. Making this worse is the movie’s (and his father’s) inconsistent attitude to him from one scene to the next – in one scene, for example, he is prone to sensory overload from a fire alarm going off, but later on in the film, he’s in the middle of a gunfight with no apparent issue. It leads up to an endgame so on-the-nose its painful – clearly intentions were good in regard to this part of the storyline, and it’s nice to see a non-neurotypical character in a mainstream blockbuster who has an active part to play in proceedings, but it would be nicer still if in doing so, the movie didn’t revert to the cliched Hollywood stereotype of that condition, a la Rain Man.

But the real crime in casting goes to the female leads. Yes, a Predator movie finally manages to have more than one main cast female character, but oh boy does it not know what to do with either of them. Munn gets a fair amount of screen time but precious little to do – I’m in fact fairly confident that her character could have been cut altogether with no appreciable difference to the plot or direction of the film. Then there’s Yvonne Strahovski playing McKenna’s ex-wife. Strahovski is an actor who made her name playing a gun-toting secret agent on Chuck, so the fact that the one time her character gets to actually pick up a gun it’s immediately taken off her as she’s told to stay at home stings all the more. Both these women deserve better roles than this, and after the controversy over Iron Man 3 and Black’s favoured original villain being dropped because the studio didn’t believe a female baddie would sell, it’s all the more mystifying to me.

What we have then, is an incoherent mess of a film which seems to want to do some good things (self-awareness, tongue in cheek parody, addressing various mental health issues and putting forward a positive portrayal of a still often-misunderstood condition) but gets in its own way far too often to do any of it successfully. It grossly misunderstands the fascination the original iteration of the titular monster created, instead making it just another generic adversary and sinking the franchise into being just another sci-fi series with a fairly bland and predictable central narrative.

Verdict: It’ll raise the occasional chuckle (sometimes even with it rather than at it) but mostly it’s a crass, overblown mess of a film which does disservice to both the 1987 original and its own cast. I’d have expected better from Black, although I’m not surprised to be able to say that Predator remains by far the best of the franchise. 4/10

Greg D. Smith