There’s a refreshing simplicity to the plot of Predator. You can boil it down to “Alien hunter picks off mercenaries in the jungle.” Technically, there’s a little more to it than that, with the mildest of ruses and a minor mission misdirect to contend with, but the gist of the film fits into an eight-word description. That seems remarkable right now in an age where every blockbuster and explosion-fest needs to have some convoluted conspiracy, twist upon twist, and a grand mystery to keep the audience interested. Predator, by contrast, banks on the basics of its premise to carry the day.
That’s a good thing, because there ain’t much of a story otherwise. As I discussed on The Serial Fanaticist Podcast, Predator offers the wisp of a theme about the military-industrial complex seeing its soldiers as interchangeable parts, while the men themselves view one another as human beings. It gradually parcels out the inevitable deaths of everyone besides its major star (and its token female character) to fill the gaps between explosions and alien encounters. And it teases the appearance of the titular antagonist nigh-perfectly, letting the audience get glimpses of the creature and his work bit by bit before he fully emerges.
But Predator is little more than a feature-length excuse to have Arnold Schwarzenegger throw down with an intergalactic brute. Everything else in the film feels like some combination of filler and set dressing. Director John McTiernan and Cinematographer Donald McAlpine know how to frame a shot and craft a sequence. Both absolutely know how to toss in buckets of bullets, reams of explosions, and scads of muscle-bound toughs traipsing through the jungle. And the special effects and gradual reveal of the Predator itself are an achievement in aesthetics and costuming.
The problem, however, is that there’s little reason to care about anything in the movie beyond the spectacle of it all. Every character in the film is one-dimensional at best, more a collection of biceps and affectations than anything approaching a human being with real depth. Sure, it’s cool to see an invisible enemy swoop in and catch these supposedly unstoppable badasses unawares, but when every figure in the frame is a walking trope or stereotype, it’s hard to muster up much excitement or investment in characters who come off like barely-painted cannon fodder.
Noooooo, not Ol' No-Name!
The performances in the movie don’t do much to counteract that. Carl Weathers does his level best, delivering an over-the-top performance in an over-the-top film, but the tone he strikes just cements the “G.I. Joe for nineteen-year-olds” vibe that already suffuses the movie. Bill Duke manages to inject some depth into Mac, another member of the standard issue grab bag of commandos, who nonetheless provides the only bit of genuine emotional ballast in the film. And Schwarzenegger is, for some utterly baffling reason, given boatloads of dialogue through much of the film, and he rewards us with a performance that anticipates Tommy Wiseau’s stilted, halting efforts to sound like a human being.
That choice is a big part of why Predator doesn’t really come together until its third act. In the last half hour or so, all of Arnold’s chums are either already dead or sidelined. There’s no more middling attempts to have corny banter between the heroes-for-hire. There’s no more faux-meaningful conversations to be had about what’s right and wrong in the throes of combat. There’s no story or theme or, thank heaven, anyone for Arnold to have to talk to.
Instead, we get what amounts to an extended professional wrestling match between Schwarzenegger (aka Dutch, one of Arnold’s numerous implausible character names) and the Predator. It’s there that the movie plays to its strengths, providing a nice cat and mouse game between the pair, where each proves a worthy adversary to the other. These isolated fisticuffs allow the film to lean into the pugilistic spectacle that provides its best setting.
Predator might actually work better if it consisted of nothing but that last section. Throw out all of the failed attempts to establish character, or gesture toward a motif, or find excuses for Arnold and company to mow down interchangeable mooks in ludicrous fashion, and you’re left with a neat vignette of the best-trained warrior on Earth fighting the best-trained warrior from some other planet. That tells a story in and of itself, one which can rely on the filmmakers’ ability to convey tension and suspense visually, and on Arnold’s physical presence and body language, which are better assets than any of the Predator’s more verbal storytelling efforts.
Predator actually started life as an alternate ending to Deliverance.
It’s just a slog to get to that point in the movie. The creature feature of an unmasked Predator is cool and creepy. Arnold and his foe’s efforts to evade and attack one another amount to an engrossing game of checkers (if not exactly a chess match). And McAlpine’s camera stalks through the jungle setting with aplomb. The audience just has to endure a tsunami of hokey dialogue, a bizarre game of mousetrap, and cheesy laugh from an alien who guffaws like a Bond villain to be able to enjoy it.
The best thing you can say for Predator is that it takes its time. Aside from a gratuitous assault on an enemy camp early in the film, McTiernan and writers Jim and John Thomas slowly unspool the dimensions of the threat facing our heroes, letting the viewer see a little more of what the Predator can do, what the creature looks like, before it’s out in the open and unleashing its full potential.
But the worst thing you can for the film is that is has no idea how to fill the time or space between Predator attacks. It can’t come up with a compelling reason the audience should care about the people falling prey to the alien’s ambushes. When the eponymous hunter isn’t actively hunting the main characters, Predator lives up (or down) to being an unironic version of Schwarzenegger spoofs like McBain, or self-aware, winking self-parodies like The Expendables series (which borrows its name from a repeated, thudding line of dialogue in this film). This movie is awash in steroid-addled bodies, stock archetypes, and over-the-top firearms fetishization, leaving it ill-equipped to do anything but have its leading figures grunt and blow things up.
The greatest strength of Predator is its simplicity. The movie is at its best when it boils down to a visual showcase and test of wills between two figures who are aesthetically striking for two very different reasons. And the greatest weakness of Predator is also its simplicity. The film suffers from a complete inability to offer anything beyond its effects, aesthetics, and final fight, which might otherwise make the rest of the proceedings deeper, smarter, or at least more entertaining than ninety overstretched minutes of “big guy go boom.”
