The Predator (2018)

…as bad as it gets:

The Predator

(2018)

 

The Predator 2018

 

 

My dear old dad always told me not to mock the afflicted, so I’m not going to take up too much of your time in talking about fan-favourite Shane Black’s lazy and truly dreadful comedy-sequel to the great Schwarzenegger original.  I mean, even that title of theirs shows how little he and so-scripter Fred Dekker could be bothered their asses.

And the only reason that I’m printing anything at all is because, just when I had the God-awful Truth or Dare down as the very worst film of 2018, along come Shane and Fred to make a liar of me with their alien predators, their comic-book army tough guys, and their cardboard villain shady government-types.

Shane and Fred also throw in a couple of predator-dogs, just to prove that they learned nothing from that other best-forgotten sequel, Predators.  (The titles are really great, aren’t they?)

This one opens straight onto a Star Wars type space fight that unfortunately made me wincingly think of Mel Brooks and Spaceballs, or History of the World, Part 1.  I never really recovered from that.

Part of the spaceship nearly hits super-macho sniper Quinn McKenna (Boyd Holbrook) just as he is about to make a hit on the head of a Mexican drug cartel.  Barely fazed, due to his super-coolness, he looks at the wreckage hurtling towards him from space, cracks a joke that is really unfunny and makes the kill anyway.  And yeah, it’s one of those films that will have you saying things like ‘makes the kill’.

Quinn gets locked up with some army vet ‘crazies’ because he has seen things he shouldn’t have and they escape, naturally.  The crazies are, of course, standard fare, not really crazy at all, just some actors trying to do insanity really, really badly and milking it for laughs that aren’t there.   You know how it goes: a guy who is supposed to have Tourette Syndrome, leading him to say filthy things that are really unfunny and another guy who has some condition that makes him tell filthy jokes that are also really unfunny.

I laughed until I didn’t.  Actually, I’m crying tears of blood just remembering this.

Why prolong the agony?  There’s nothing good to say about this mess.  Nothing.  If you’re interested you’ll see a normal-sized predator, an eleven-foot one and some predator dogs.  Everybody fights each other and there are a few attempts at in-jokes (‘GET TO THE CHOPPA!’) that at this stage were predictably…all together now:  REALLY UNFUNNY.

And when you think that it can get no worse, there’s the film’s ending, which Shane apparently had left over from his Iron Man III.

The one really efficient thing about this one is that it has probably killed the franchise stone dead.  So maybe it had something going for it, at that.

 

 

 

 

 

Author: Charley Brady

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7 Comments

  1. Well, so here is another one I will not spend money to see, I’ll just wait until it is on HBO and then most likely speep through most of it. Thanks Charley for saving me a Bob or two.

  2. I genuinely try to find some good in every film, considering the amount of time that people put into making them; but sometimes you just can’t. Even shit has its own integrity; ‘Truth of Dare’ and ‘The Predator’ have none.

  3. Charley I got to 40 minutes of runtime and switched it off couldn’t hack anymore of the torture that was invading my brain.

  4. Patrick, I wonder how long you would have lasted with ‘Suspiria’. Yep, just when I had thought I’d found my two very worst films of the year (‘Truth or Dare’ and ‘The Predator’) along I trotted to the cinema to see this remake of Dario Argento’s classic 70s original. Except this time they have an Italian art director who has turned it into an ass-numbing three-hour head-scratcher.

    Bloated, painfully pretentious and stuck firmly up its own rear end, with Tilda Swinton – for no explicable reason – playing three parts, I felt like one of the extras from ‘The Walking Dead’ when I emerged blinking into the light.

    When I looked up the reviews I was somehow not surprised to learn that it received an eight-minute standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival. And if I’d read that first it would have saved me three hours of my life – because I doubt that they understood it any more than I did.

  5. You know yourself Charley once its artsy fartsy it must have much deeper meaning and hidden subtleties that us great unwashed just simply can’t grasp.

    Looks like I will be given this one a miss or will I torture myself so I can see for myself what made you feel like a Walking Dead extra?.

  6. Oh and I’ve just noticed that Thom Yorke of Radiohead does the score, as music goes Radiohead are probably the most pretentious band on the planet.

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