The Predator (2018)

THE PREDATOR (2018) Two stars

One of these days, they’ll get a PREDATOR sequel right and make a film with only Predator characters.

Yeah, that’s right, no human characters.

THE PREDATOR — the fourth or sixth entry (depending on whether or not you want to count two ALIEN VS. PREDATOR movies that combine two 20th Century Fox cash cows) in a series that began only decades ago — gives us a tasty hint of a Predator-only film with a Mega Predator vs. Predator fight scene. It’s the highlight of the film, then it’s back to our more generic human characters.

Seeing that the Walt Disney Company recently acquired 20th Century Fox, we can bet our sweet hard-earned that Disney will be pumping out PREDATOR productions once a year or every two years.

I doubt they’ll get it right.

Anyway, we especially have too many anonymous scientist and military characters in THE PREDATOR, and they’re exhibits for why I stump for the systematic eradication of human characters in PREDATOR movies.

I mean, I get it, they’re around to amplify the body count, but their perfunctory dialogue scenes are dead weight that drag the movie down until the characters are (thankfully) eliminated.

PREDATOR ’87 does not have perfunctory dialogue and dead weight, and it does not drag. It plays like “a lean, mean fighting machine” (in the great words from STRIPES) and it’s a streamlined entertainment that moves faster than this, er, last year’s model (an Elvis Costello reference following STRIPES).

The cast of the original PREDATOR amounted to 16 actors.

By comparison, THE PREDATOR features approximately 50 credited and 20 uncredited performers.

Favorite character: “Sobbing veterinarian.” Second favorite: “Cantina bartender.” Show: “Halloween mom.”

Shane Black co-wrote and directed THE PREDATOR.

You might remember Black, and we definitely remember his movies.

Black’s screenwriting credits: LETHAL WEAPON, LETHAL WEAPON 2, THE LAST BOY SCOUT, LAST ACTION HERO, and THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT, for which he received a $4 million payday.

You might remember Black from the first PREDATOR.

He played Rick Hawkins, a bespectacled, foul-mouthed mercenary. He’s a foul mouth on an epic scale.

Hawkins tells jokes like “The other day, I was going down on my girlfriend. I said to her, ‘Jeez, you’ve got a big pussy. Jeez, you’ve got a big pussy.’ She said, ‘Why did you say that twice?’ I said, ‘I didn’t.’ See, it was ‘cause of the echo.”

Black did not receive a writing credit on PREDATOR, but we can almost bet that he wrote Hawkins’ dialogue.

Especially since THE PREDATOR features a scene where a soldier with Tourette’s blurts out “Eat your pussy!”

This character, named Baxley and played by Thomas Jane, later spouts more dialogue from the Planet X, “Fuck me in the face with an aardvark.”

At the end of the day, THE PREDATOR is not a bad movie, nor a good one, and I doubt that I’ll be able to remember it for too much longer. I’ll say that I’ve killed two hours of my life in worse fashion many times before and hopefully not as many times after.