The Predator (2018) Dir: Shane Black
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At the time of posting, this was the last film I needed to watch from this popular, if not critically acclaimed franchise. I'll be honest, I wasn't all that desperate to watch this, but when I saw it had arrived onto Disney Plus, I figured why not?
Directed by Shane Black, this 2018 entry into the long-running franchise seemed to follow a similar formula to the second and third films.
The story wasn't awful, but it certainly wasn't good either. It felt messy and clunky. The dialogue was woeful, which was the film's biggest drawback by some way. The CGI was pretty inconsistent, with shots either looking terrific or terrible.
The action was at least fun, and while it was definitely quite dumb, it reached that "so bad it's good" level of ridiculousness that left me having a whole lot of fun with it. On a more serious note, attempting to highlight autism was a nice idea, but I'm not sure they executed it particularly well, unfortunately.
Boyd Holbrook's protagonist is the typical American soldier type, and provides nothing of value. Poorly written and delivered one-liners were eye-roll worthy at best.
Olivia Munn has a better showing, but she is still hampered by the writing. She does however have the second best performance of the film.
She is only beaten by Sterling K. Brown, who isn't brilliant by any means, but does provide a more intriguing character and performance than everyone else.
The young Jacob Tremblay tries to take what he's given and run with it, but the film's strange depiction of autism, for which his character lives with, means that Tremblay ends up looking a little mediocre.
Trevante Rhodes showed glimpses of quality acting, but, once again, the terrible writing drags him down so much that it's frustrating.
Comedian Keegan-Michael Key felt immediately like a strange casting choice, and with him essentially being tadked with making the film funny, he has a tall order. He gets a few solidly funny lines in, but beyond that, his character feels pointless.
I'll also give mentions to some of the other notable cast members; Yvonne Strahovski, Augusto Aguilera, Thomas Jane, Alfie Allen, Lochlyn Munro and the man inside the Predator suit; Brian A. Prince.
Overall, this was another mediocre edition to an already mediocre franchise. That said, it still had a lot of fun elements that I enjoyed, even if a lot of my enjoyment was due to how laughably bad it was.
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