The Predator (2018) - Episode 129

“Well, we took a vote. Predator's cooler, right?” Our LV-RMP series, running through the combined Alien and Predator series, arrives at Shane Black’s 2018 sequel, the confusingly named The Predator.

A military sniper (Boyd Holbrook) witnesses a runaway Yautja ship crash landing in a Mexican jungle, and barely escapes with his life and a rucksack full of the creature’s hunting tech, which he intends to stash as evidence of extraterrestrial life. While a shadowy arm of the government tries to keep him under wraps by sending him to a psychiatric ward alongside a gang of misfit soldiers and marines with a colourful array of sweary conditions, his package inadvertently ends up with his estranged young son, necessitating a guns-blazing rescue mission as our alien hunter is in hot pursuit - while an even more deadly interloper stalks them all.

30 years after appearing as a supporting actor in the seminal original, Black leveraged his post-Kiss KIss Bang Bang career renaissance to helm an $88 million project from a screenplay written alongside his key early collaborator Fred Dekker. Hopes were high for a return to form, but a lukewarm critical reception and middling business ensued. Were Gali, Devlin and Matt any more enamoured, or was this another underwhelming entry that failed to recapture the magic of John McTiernan?

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