It was the golden age of the Hollywood action movie. Over the 16 years between “Return of the Jedi” and George Lucas’s return to that galaxy far, far away with “The Phantom Menace”, explosions, musclebound guys in vests, and high body counts reigned supreme.
It was a time before mega-franchises and superheroes had become the dominant species in multiplexes, when heroic men — and, with the notable exception of the trailblazing Ripley in “Aliens”, it was almost exclusively men — saved the day with little more than their wits, oversized muscles, and vast arsenals of automatic weapons to protect them.
But the best entries in the genre offered so much more than slow-motion leaps from burning buildings and precision-targeted bullets. With very few exceptions, the bona fide action classics were also a lot of fun, fully aware of the ludicrousness of their scenarios, as they indulged their bad guys’ penchant for monologuing, or gifted Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis, and — latterly — Nicolas Cage the sort of pithy one-liners the rest of us would come up with a few hours too late.
Indeed, the likes of “Die Hard”, “RoboCop”, “Total Recall”, “Terminator 2: Judgment Day”, “Speed”, “The Rock”, “Con Air”, “Face/Off” and — of course — the original “Predator” are all just as notable for their quotability as the stunts. And even when the action gets intense, they rarely forget that — like a rollercoaster — this genre is designed primarily to entertain. It’s a mantra the incredibly fun — at times borderline silly — “Predator: Badlands” has remembered in ways most of the other Predator movies have not.
Director and “Predator” overlord Dan Trachtenberg is arguably the best thing to happen to the series since the 1987 original. First, he resurrected the franchise with the back-to-basics “Prey“, and while this year’s animated anthology “Killer of Killers” was little more than “Predators through time” — albeit with a fun sci-fi linking story — it did at least bring some new ideas to the table. Now he’s taken his appetite for innovation one step further by turning a Predator (or Yautja, to use the species’ franchise-accurate name) into the hero of his own story.
It’s probably the most radical step the franchise has ever taken, though just as much has been made of “Badlands”‘ PG-13 (12A in the UK) age rating, a far cry from the gory R (originally 18, now 15) of the original 1987 “Predator”. This is arguably, however, a bit of a red herring.
This is not the first time a veteran franchise renowned for its violence has “gone soft” — “Terminator”, “RoboCop” and even “Predator” itself (via the first “Alien v Predator” movie) have all embraced the more lucrative box-office opportunities of a lower certification. In fact, unless you’re going for all-out horror, you need a very good reason to exclude the kids these days, whether it’s chasing awards (“Joker”) or indulging the potty-mouthed excesses of “Deadpool”. Old-school, all-guns-blazing splatterfests have become something of a rarity in modern Hollywood, and besides — if you really want copious quantities of the red stuff — “Killer of Killers” does deliver it in spades.
But the comparative lack of violence is no betrayal of Arnie’s original jungle adventure. The last thing this veteran franchise required was another story about an unfortunate human caught in the crosshairs of the galaxy’s greatest hunters. We also didn’t need to see hero Predator Dek’s brother’s head in gruesome, entrail-dripping close-up to understand that he’s been decapitated by a father who makes Darth Vader look like dad of the year.
That bleak prologue — in which Papa Predator decides Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi) is an embarrassment to the family and must therefore be executed — is the outlier in a movie that lightens up as soon as Dek sets foot on the “Death Planet” of Genna, eager to prove his worth.
It’s a joyfully ridiculous world, a planet-wide booby trap where plants are armed with projectile weapons and the bugs are highly explosive. Even the Kalisk, the “unkillable” monster on Dek’s shopping list, has the ludicrous ability to regrow body parts seconds after they’re lopped off. It’s the ultimate playground for a species whose entire culture is based around hunting and killing, but hardly fashioned in the realms of “serious” sci-fi — if Dek had eyebrows, surely even he would raise them.
And yet the setting feels entirely reasonable in a franchise that’s been larger-than-life pretty much from day one. Released just a year after James Cameron’s peerless “Aliens”, John “Die Hard” McTiernan’s original “Predator” remains the second-best sci-fi actioner of all time. But it owes as much to fellow Schwarzenegger vehicle “Commando” (1985) as it does to Cameron’s legendary bug hunt.
Its soldiers are broader (in multiple senses of the word) than “Aliens”‘ Colonial Marines; an assortment of pumped-up bundles of testosterone who’d be a match for anyone — or anything — aside from the extraterrestrial hunter who’s out to turn their rainforest adventure into a wake. Schwarzenegger’s Alan “Dutch” Schaefer is, to all intents and purposes, a superhero, while the film is quotable as hell — “Get to da choppa!”, “If it bleeds, we can kill it”, “You are one ugly mother******,” etc. Even the doomed Predator gets to laugh before the end credits, albeit with a generous dollop of gallows humor.
Meanwhile, “Badlands”‘ blatant “Alien” crossover — with villainous corporation Weyland-Yutani serving as prime antagonist — does not mean this is an “Alien” movie by stealth. Of course, the franchises have been sharing a universe ever since Dark Horse Comics launched its popular range of “Aliens vs Predator” comic books in the late ’80s — a Xenomorph skull subsequently turned up as a trophy in 1990’s “Predator 2”, before Hollywood took the team-up one step further with the two “AVP” movies of the ’00s. But aside from their violent extra-terrestrial origins, the two franchises have always had little common ground tonally.
The presence of Weyland-Yutani is therefore best regarded as shorthand, an efficient way of explaining why all those synthetics are hunting the Kalisk while sidestepping the need for tiresome exposition. Talking torso Thia (Elle Fanning) is not the ideal foil for Dek because her origins are an “Alien” in-joke — she’s perfect because she’s funny, optimistic, and forms an unlikely, “Lethal Weapon”-style double act with the more taciturn leading man. (It’s also fun that she homages Chewbacca’s C-3PO backpack from “The Empire Strikes Back”.)
Go into “Predator: Badlands” expecting a po-faced sci-fi action movie and you will be disappointed. Go in prepared for silliness, however, and you get to enjoy a surprisingly cute alien sidekick (Bud), a Yautja going full MacGyver with the planet’s flora and fauna, and — in “Badlands”‘ best sequence — Thia’s disembodied legs doing their best to outshine Wallace and Gromit’s “Wrong Trousers”.
It’s the sort of overblown, “who cares?” silliness that’ll bring a massive smile to your face if you let it, “Predator”‘s answer to the brilliantly tongue-in-cheek “Thor: Ragnarok”. And is it really any sillier than the notion of a technologically advanced race of aliens who devote their lives to hunting, and — seemingly — little else? In the ’80s and ’90s, we embraced the overblown ludicrousness of action movies. There’s no harm in doing so again.
“Predator: Badlands” is in theaters now. You can watch the rest of the Predator movies on Hulu (US) or Disney+ (UK/International).