Black, who costarred in the original Predator and cowrote this new installment, has intermittently flourished as both a writer ( Lethal Weapon, The Last Boy Scout) and a writer-director ( Iron Man 3, The Nice Guys), and he remains a reliable source of zippy and fantastically profane dialogue, the laughs and the winces layered just so. The Predator is pure ultraviolent frivolity, as weightless and tasteless and frictionless as its five overachieving-B-movie predecessors. “Worst thing about the end times?” muses Trevante Rhodes in this new installment, playing a chain-smoking member of yet another ragtag crew, and a hell of a long way from Moonlight. Each dangles the tantalizing threat of total apocalypse, and each, to some tightly controlled degree, delivers. They get relatively little critical respect and always make money. Sometimes these films are gross, and sometimes they are super gross. The path from the hallowed 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle Predator to Friday’s Shane Black–directed The Predator-the sixth movie in the series, counting a ludicrous two-flick hookup with the Alien franchise-is fraught with chaos, wild-eyed diversions, grody overindulgence, and geysers of blood both red and fluorescent green. Which members of this new ragtag crew will get disemboweled, and/or decapitated, and/or skinned alive, and/or extremely blown up? Will this gore be PG-13 whimsical or hard-R repugnant? Will our favorite mysterious race of murderous space aliens be the bad guys this time, or just kind of the bad guys? Will the killing field be located in Central America, or Antarctica, or space, or the parking lot of a Colorado Papa John’s? Will the dialogue be merely “OK, pussyface, it’s your move” uncouth, or full-blown “If your mom’s vagina were a video game, it would be rated E, for everyone” uncouth? Who will yell, “ GET TO THE CHOPPER”? And who will actually get to it? You walk into each new Predator movie with a very specific, and very rigid, set of questions.
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March 2023
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