Predator is a contender for worst film of the year–in a year of shitty movies. Despite the critics who say this movie’s self-aware and able to laugh at the quirks of the franchise, the humor is unevenly distributed and punches down an awful lot. A team of writers sat down and came up with a boatload of autism jokes they thought they could hallpass by making the damsel-in-distress a kid on the spectrum. Olivia Munn undresses to fully nude twice in the span of a few minutes in the first few scenes of the film with no apparent need of the plot or character arc. The “looney” (a play on Goonie, maybe?) with tourette’s is kind of emblematic of the entire film’s M.O.: say whatever crazy shit you want to and then blame it on how broken/crazy/progressive/edgy you’re being by portraying misfits. All you’re left with is a two minute scene where Munn has to ask over and over why someone has just said “eat my pussy,” and we’re kind of left asking why that made it to the final script ourselves. The mom character does what moms do and complains about being helpless without really being given any action or lines to help. She starts out as kind of milquetoast, trying to find two ill-fitting costumes for her son’s (solo!) trick-or-treating, and then the film gives her a chance to be truly badass only to leave her being kind of meh at the end and lacking any kind of real resolution.
The Central Premise of this film is pretty harmful (not to mention boring, not to mention stupid) in a number of ways, but don’t take my word for it–listen to funnier people than me talk about their own lived experiences and the way that pop culture’s depiction of them is such a drag. In the meantime, it still tastes pretty sour that so many of Munn’s coworkers were so unforgivably unsupportive toward her after she did them such a solid at the pressers last week by jumping on the PR grenade, as it were. One wishes they had cut out more than just the child Predator’s scenes, maybe. Maybe an extra hour or so?
Sterling K. Brown was a great villain but the film doesn’t rise to his performance. The Big Bad Guy suffers from the Thanos problem all over again: the tension of the action sequences relies on him being inconsistently powerful and weak, evil and merciful. The good guys spend an awful lot of time killing American soldiers, which I guess just goes to show how far we’ve come from the days of The Matrix being avant-garde for its treatment of police officers and security guards. Never thought I would look back at nostalgia at Tag… but… this film got me there.
