I have to confess at the outset that this is the first film of the Predator film franchise that I have seen. I know that the first "Predator" (1987) starring Arnold Schwarzenegger was very popular but I was not able to see it (up to now), so I never got interested in watching any of the sequels in 1990 and 2010, with two "Alien vs. Predator" films between them in 2004 and 2007. I was surprised that they were reviving the franchise again this year, so I decided to finally go see what it was all about.
The film starts with a Predator spacecraft crashed on earth just where Army Ranger Quinn McKenna (Boyd Holbrook) was on a mission. He was able to shoot the Predator down and grab its armor, and mailed it to his home address in the US, where his ex-wife Emily (Yvonne Strahovsky) and son Rory (Jacob Tremblay) lived.
Meanwhile, government agent Will Traeger (Sterling K. Brown) invited biologist Casey Bracket (Olivia Munn) to study the body of the unconscious Predator in a special facility. But since it is not dead, it was no surprise that it woke up, violently killed everyone in the lab (except Casey and Traeger of course), and set out to recover its lost armor.
Boyd Holbrook and Olivia Munn were attractive lead stars and were good in their action scenes. Not sure how Munn's evolutionary biologist got her firearms training but she was gung-ho with them as the rest of the boys. They gave Sterling K. Brown a sinister twinkle in his eyes that made him look like a natural antagonist.
I do not really know how the Predators (supposedly with human DNA in their genome) in this new sequel compared to the previous incarnations of Predators, so I cannot comment. There were even Predator dogs here which did not really matter too much in the action. However, this Shane Black film was crazy in two very different ways -- in terms of its high level of violence, and in terms of low level of comedy.
The blood and gore level of the kills of the evolved Predators was off the charts as innumerable cannon fodder extras were sliced in half, impaled into trees or walls, stabbed into the eyes, shot clean through the body or exploded into smithereens. People who love this type of extreme action will have a field day with the insanely imaginative ways they thought of how Predators could slaughter a poor hapless human being.
On the other end, this film also had a silly streak with its raunchy offensive collection of jokes. These jokes were care of the rowdy bunch of captive soldiers that McKenna was grouped with -- Williams (Trevante Rhodes), Coyle (Keegan Michael Key), Baxley (Thomas Jane), Nettles (Augusto Aguilera) and Lynch (Alfie Allen). Key had all the wildest wisecracks. Jane used Tourette's syndrome to be ridiculous.
To balance things off with some drama, there was the character of McKenna's autistic son Rory, played by the child actor Jacob Tremblay, who had previously wowed us with his previous roles in "Room" (2015) and "Wonder" (2017). Some hardcore action fans may not like having a child character in the story as it may dampen the savagery (not that it affected the ferocity here), but having Rory there sort of opened up the story of the franchise to more sequels in the future. 6/10.
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