The Predator could have been the chance of the franchise to finally have an identity

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our short reviews on festival films, VR previews and other special releases. This criticism comes from the 2018 Toronto International Film Festival. Warning: good spoilers in front.

Movie series often take strange turns in their lives, but the Predator the franchise has always been his unique and bizarre case. John McTiernan's original in 1987 was an Arnold Schwarzenegger action vehicle that pitted a group of military commandos against an interstellar fighter who had kidnapped them one by one. He brought with him all the one-liners, alpha-male postures and explosions that the decade required, and was successful enough to warrant a sequel. But three years later, Predator 2 failed at the box office and the property remained dormant for 14 years. It finally resurfaced as part of Alien vs. Predator, and although mash-up movies are usually a creative coup de grace, the movie has been a success enough to justify its own sequel. Robert Rodriguez and director Nimród Antal have tried to revive everything in 2010. The predators – And again, things have calmed down.

Predator is the little franchise that could: never deliver a sequel that is a real home run, but always do just good enough to justify another round at the box office bat.

But with The predator, filmmaker Shane Black is trying to hand over the franchise to the honor. Originally known for writing movies like Deadly weapon and The last action heroBlack has since been known as a dual threat writer and director, combining action and comedy with films like Iron Man 3 and The good ones. (He has a story with the Predator franchise also, having appeared as an actor in the first film.) With co-author Fred Dekker (The monsters brigade, Robocop 2), he tries to turn The predator in an R-rated comic-action-horror hybrid, a movie that salutes the genre roll of the 1980s that spawned the original while trying to add its own idiosyncratic ride.

It looks awesome in concept. A reflection of Shane Black could theoretically give the franchise its own voice and authoritative identity – the only thing it had been missing since 1987. But to get there, the film should actually produce.

What is the genre?

The return of action in the 1980s in the field of science fiction was concocted with a rewind of the comedy monster of the 1980s.

What is it about?

Mercenary Quinn McKenna (Boyd Holbrook) suddenly stopped a mission when a Predator crushed his ship and quickly removed Quinn's colleagues. Quinn is able to run away with some of the creature's armor and send it home for safekeeping. But shortly thereafter, he was captured by Project Stargazer, a secret government organization created to study the Predators since they began visiting the Earth in 1987. Stargazer is led by Traitor Traitor (Sterling K. Brown of That's us, constantly chewing scenes), who decides to send Quinn to a psychiatric hospital to preemptively discredit any information that he might share with the general public.

Finally, Traeger discovers that Predator Quinn has discovered that, in fact, bigger Predator who chased him across the galaxy and who has now landed on Earth. But in one of the most complicated sets in recent history, the armor of Predator Quinn, sent home, landed in the hands of her young son, Rory (BedroomJacob Tremblay). Having the armor made Rory a target, and Quinn must team up with a group of maladjusted psychiatric hospital – and a scientist named Casey Brackett (Olivia Munn) – to save his son and stop both Traeger and the mega giant. Predator.

What is it really about?

If the summary of this plot was hard to follow, you'll have a little idea of ​​what it's like to watch The predator. Clearly, the intricate complicated machinations may work if the film itself has enough momentum to propel the audience through all of this, or if there is a more prominent and dominant theme or feeling that is bound asset. Neither is really the case with The predator, however. Black's film shows various ideas along the way – how the lack of self-awareness of the environment can lead to our downfall (the Predators hunt the Earth more often as they realize that climate change will soon destroy the planet) whoever different from us prevents us from clearly seeing their potential. (Rory's son is autistic, which the Predator recognizes as a strength, not a weakness). But these ideas are more like passive interests than any kind of thematic foundation.

If anything, it seems like Black wants The predator to satirize the ridiculous excess of 80s action movies by subverting them. Rather than a team of muscular heroes, Quinn's support comes from the ragtag group he meets on the way to the psychiatric hospital: a group of jokers, deviants and weirdos suffering one way or another post-traumatic stress. Keegan-Michael Key has room to shine here as Coyle, a cut-up that keeps on joking (and is reminiscent of the character Black played in the original movie). Nebraska (Trevante Rhodes, Moonlight), which brings a sense of complete empathy as a former commander who attempted to commit suicide. But while the film definitely tries to upset the 80s formula, it never goes far enough to engage, finally falling on the same tropes of the action movie stupid that initially seems to make fun.

Photo: Twentieth Century Fox

Is it good?

There are some interesting things about The predator, of course. Some laughs come up, and the individual actors, such as Key and Holbrook, have different rhythms that really feel. A couple of sequences are really memorable, for example when Rory is dressed in treatment with Predator's armor and stumbles at his school.

But distribution is never really done as a coherent whole. They shoot scenes that are clearly intended to be filled with funny back-and-forth in a series of clumsy, disconnected moments that can not end soon enough. There is also a strange tonal tension throughout the film: it's not funny enough to be really a comedy, it's not daring enough to be an innovative action movie, and the horror elements are widely treated as an afterthought. Black knows how to mix humor, action and genre. his directorial debut, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, easily combine the different tones with a film-black frame in an extremely satisfying way. But The predator is too timid to engage totally in one direction, perhaps for fear of alienating a potential segment of the fan base, and ends up feeling like the least inspiring combination of all possible elements.

These conspiracy rallies do not help either. Movies do not have to be as rare as the original ones. Predator, but this version seems to feed the intrigues just to have them, all cut in a surprisingly inelegant way. The film passes between so many characters that it is almost impossible to feel a real tension, a much less emotional investment. As the end comes, what should be one of the most exciting movie characters' deaths happens so quickly that viewers might not even realize at all. Combine this with an excessive reliance on computer-generated images for most Predator events, and the result is a film that seems to deprive the franchise of its simplest and simplest pleasures.

What should it be evaluated?

It is an "R" and it should be one: it is loaded with violence, language and gore from top to bottom.

How can I actually watch it?

The predator arrives at the cinema on September 14th.