Predators from 2010? It had two future two-time Oscar winners, one of whom had already won one of his Oscars.
That's just one of the things I wanted to talk about in a post about the two movies in the larger Predator franchise -- if you don't count the Alien vs. Predator movies -- that I hadn't seen before this weekend.
When the movie-watching year resets and I can watch anything I want again, I've made a habit of completing little projects like this in recent years. Last year in February I watched The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and Spider-Man 3, which were the only two Spider-Man movies I had yet to see -- though maybe it would have been smart to wait for my younger son on that one, considering that he's since become a Spider-Man fanatic. Instead we've started this year watching Marvel movies he hadn't seen from the Captain America and Avengers franchises, which is another example of a project like this, though not in this case watching movies that I hadn't seen myself. (We also watched the original Spider-Man from 2002, since he was raised on Tom Holland as Spider-Man and only saw Toby Maguire in the role in that new Spider-Man movie from a couple years ago.)
I thought there was a similar thing in 2024, but perhaps not because I'm not seeing it. Though in 2023 around this time of year, I did complete the Rocky series with a viewing of Rocky II the night after I watched Creed III.
Enough historical precedent. The reason to watch Predators (2010) and The Predator (2018) seems obvious enough. I'm clearly a new devotee of this series, having placed both of Dan Trachtenberg's live-action Predator movies in my top ten of their respective years, first Prey in 2022 and then most recently, Predator: Badlands just this past year. Although I may like Prey more, Predator: Badlands was even higher than Prey, #5 vs. #7 -- which says more about the quality of the competition than an absolute value for each film. The animated Predator: Killer of Killers also did very respectably in last year's rankings, but nowhere near the top ten.
I'm going to finish this project off with a rewatch of Predator: Badlands tonight, since it's just recently arrived on Disney+. I suspect I'll write about it tomorrow, but don't hold me to that.
Another reason it was important to watch these movies is that I have been implicitly damning them every time I write about a new Predator movie I like -- which was not exactly fair, given that I'd never seen them. I don't diss them specifically, of course, but I have assumed it was safe to refer to the entire franchise as a "moribund franchise" that Trachtenberg raised out of the depths of its despair.
I started with Nimrod Antal's Predators on Thursday night, though I didn't finish it until yesterday afternoon/early evening/later evening. Despite the interruptions, I liked it almost enough to recommend it, though in the end it fell short of that at 2.5 stars. I was sort of glad that it dipped in quality near the end, because that added weight to my previously risky argument that the franchise hadn't been any good before Trachtenberg came along. (At least not since the original.)
Shane Black's The Predator, which leaned heavily into what people think is his strength, an almost Joss Whedon-style, f-bomb laden joking camaraderie between the characters? Well that wasn't good from the start. I didn't get anything out of that one, despite the presence of likable actors like Olivia Munn, Keegan-Michael Key and Sterling K. Brown.
In a piece like this, I might ordinarily go into the plot of the two movies, talk about what worked, talk about what didn't work. To be honest, I'm not really feeling that today. So let's get to the headline bit about the two-time Oscar winners from Predators, and see what energy I might have left over to talk about The Predator.
So you'd know that Adrien Brody was the star of Predators -- at least, I knew it, as he was the only one I definitively remembered from the ads I saw of it 15 years ago. You'd also know that Brody just won his second, and presumably final, Oscar last year for The Brutalist, having first won for The Pianist in 2002. (I didn't realize the structural similarity of those two titles until just now.) It being the probable last was one of the reasons he wouldn't get off the goddamn stage.
But you probably wouldn't know that a then-unknown Mahershala Ali was in, and one of the first killed off in, Predators. This is when he was still credited as Mahershalalhashbaz Ali. Ali didn't become known to most of us until he won his first best supporting actor Oscar for Moonlight six years later, before winning his second for Green Book only two years after that. If memory serves, Ali spent only a reasonable amount of time on stage.
Winning multiple Academy awards is not completely uncommon -- it's also been done this century by Emma Stone, Daniel Day-Lewis, Frances McDormand, Cate Blanchett, Renee Zellweger, Christophe Waltz and Sean Penn, with Hillary Swank, Denzel Washington and Anthony Hopkins having won a second this century after winning their first last century. But having two in the same movie, especially when it's a Predator movie, still strikes me as pretty unlikely. (What little we knew at the time about the potential of Ali.)
Having the characters dropped unconscious from a craft in the sky into a game preserve on a distant plant, and having to awaken mid-air in order to deploy their parachutes, is a good way to get us into the action and set the scene. I was on board for this and thought I could, potentially, be watching another prestige object in the Predator series. In addition to those already mentioned, the film collects a watchable group that includes Topher Grace, Alice Braga, Danny Trejo, Walton Goggins, and a surprise later appearance from Laurence Fishburne as a guy who has been there a lot longer, and has the crazy to prove it.
But as the movie went on, and as the Predators were revealed more and seemed less interesting, it became more and more mid. The affection for this film by Filmspotting co-host Josh Larsen is not totally unfounded, but I'm glad to say this has nothing on Trachtenberg's movies.
The Predator, which I watched immediately after finishing up Predators last night, felt off to me from the start. This is also a frame story featuring a core cast of about seven characters who get picked off one by one, though in this case most of them are part of a ragtag military group who like to give each other shit, almost excessively so, to the point of affectation in the script. They're led by Boyd Holbrook, who has never been a favorite of mine, though as mentioned before, I do enjoy Munn, Key and Brown. There's a Moonlight connection with this one as well, as Trevante Rhodes is also in the cast, though this movie does show the limits of his charisma and I think explains why he hasn't continued to have much work. (Thomas Jane has never been a favorite, though Alfie Allen is always fun to see, because it always makes me think of his sister and the song she wrote about him.)
This story is a bit more all over the place, taking place on Earth and involving alien tech being passed around between shady military people and these ragtag soldiers, as well as a biologist played by Munn. The story also involves the neurodivergent son of Holbrook's character, played by Room actor Jacob Tremblay, who was such a revelation in that movie and so flat in this one, only a few years later. Anyway, it's jokey and messy and for the most part I just wanted it to be over.
The thing I find very interesting about this series -- when I think back to the original and Predator 2, which was actually the first film in the series that I ever saw -- is that I'm not sure any of the movies has any plot connection to any of the other movies. The first sequel would have been the most likely, but because Schwarzenegger didn't return, replaced by Danny Glover, whatever connective tissue there was would have been pretty thin. And it takes place in an entirely different environment. So I'm going to say there was basically none.
My thought was that Trachtenberg's movies were supposed to connect to each other, but so far, the three are very different. My understanding was that Killer of Killers was supposed to lay the groundwork for Badlands, but an explicit connection between them was thin if it existed at all. I suppose the most similar two movies are Predators and Killer of Killers because both focus on Predators fighting people who have been chosen specifically for representing a different brand of warrior that can challenge them. Did we mention one of the characters in Predators is a Yakuza hitman who's good with a sword? That itself is very similar to one of the three stories in Killer of Killers, albeit from a very different time period.
One funny similarity I did notice? The two movies I watched in the past two days were both exactly 107 minutes, with the one I'm going to watch tonight being only one minute longer than that. The original Predator is 107 minutes and Predator 2 is 108. Trachtenberg's previous two do deviate from that formula just a little, with Prey seven minutes shorter at 100 and the animated movie, perhaps unsurprisingly, running only 85 minutes.
I'm not quite so interested in getting a holistic view of the entire Predator series that I need to rewatch either the original two movies, rewatch Killer of Killers or Prey, or see the one Alien vs. Predator movie I haven't seen. Besides, there are only so many days in a weekend. But I do look forward to rewatching Badlands tonight, and I'll let you know if any holistic impressions emerge from that viewing.
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