Director: Dan Trachtenberg
Writer: Patrick Aison
Cast: Amber Midthunder as Naru, Dakota Beavers as Taabe, Dane DeLiegro as The Predator
Release: August 5, 2022
Running Time: 100 Minutes
As a film, 1987’s Predator has proven to be an enduring classic of 1980s action cinema. It cemented Schwarzenegger’s place in the pantheon of cinematic action heroes, and its title character has gone on to become a lasting favourite of sci-fi fans. Attempts to spin Predator into a film franchise, however, have proven futile. The first sequel transplanted the action from the third world jungle setting to a dystopian cyberpunk Los Angeles. Whilst Predator 2 has received a little has received a little bit of a reappraisal in recent years and become something of a cult classic, it is still not a very well liked film. Following the sequel, the series on screen went into dormancy. The character itself, however, remained popular. He made his way into the world of action figures and comic books. His lore was expanded and he was cast as kind of a de facto protagonist in a struggle against fellow sci-fi icon, the alien from the Alien franchise. He made his way into the Valiant Comics universe, where he squared off against one of Valiant’s flagship characters at the time, Gold Key Comics’ silver age hero Magnus the robot fighter. The Alien Vs. Predator crossover spun from comics into the world of video games. If you are a “millennial” of a certain age, some of this glut of spin-off media may have actually served as your introduction to the character.
It was through the “AvP” crossover that Hollywood would try again to turn the character into a film franchise. Throughout the first decade of the new millennium, a pair of Alien Versus Predator movies would see release. Neither was good, and the second was exponentially worse than its predecessor. In 2010, the studio would try again in the form of one of modern Hollywood’s favourite tropes: the “soft reboot.” The resulting film, Predators, moved the series back to a jungle setting and attempted to return it to its more traditional action roots. Unfortunately, the knowledge of how to make an action film had been well and truly lost to Hollywood by that time. Poorly framed and dull action sequences coupled with bad casting (Adrian Brody is not an action star) yielded a dull and forgettable flick. With that, the series went dormant again. With superhero flicks getting a little long in the tooth, and a series of high profile disasters relegating Star Wars to television serial status, the house of mouse has seemingly been casting about for another venerable property with a pre-installed fanbase to milk. It was time once again to pull on the desiccated udders of the cursed Predator franchise to see what results would be yielded. Miraculously, the old girl was not dry yet. Some rank, gray milk shot forth in the form of 2018’s The Predator. A thoroughly modern Disney affair, it offered up plenty of quips and puns – as well as the most believable casting of a scientist character since Denise Richards’ Christmas Jones in Olivia Munn’s Casey Brackett – but not much in the way of entertainment. Disney was not done with the ailing extraterrestrial hunter just yet, however. One last pull on that chapped, spent teat has yielded 2022’s Prey.
Prey tells the story of Naru, a tomboyish Comanche girl who aspires to be a hunter like her old brother, Taabe. A hunt for a man-eating mountain lion that has been killing their kinsmen brings Naru and Taabe into conflict with a slightly more primal version of the predator. The promotion and release of Prey was a veritable what’s what of what’s wrong with modern “woke” Hollywood. All of the industry’s favourite narratives were pre-loaded. Rather than speaking about the actual film, the promotion was instead organized around emotional blackmail. This was not just another “creature feature,” you see, this was about representation. If you do not enjoy this film, you are a racist and a sexist. White dudes hate this film because its main character is a “woman of colour.” Even now, with the film’s release fading in the rearview, one still finds the odd shill account posting vomitous tripe like “white dudes hating on Prey because the main character a woman, but (insert nonsensical non sequitur here).” It is a pathetic marketing technique that studios resort to because the product that they have been defecating on cinema goers and streaming consumers is not good. They know it is not good. Make no mistake, Prey is not a good movie.
Under the mountains of malicious and bullying faux guerrilla marketing lies a film with an identity crisis. A piece of work torn between what it should have been and what the filmmakers and scolding man-child shills think it is. The original Predator, for all of the hype it receives now, is essentially a basic sort of “creature feature” flick. It is the kind of thing that pops up on late night cable, or on some UHF television network on a Saturday afternoon, sandwiched between some forgotten edit of a poorly dubbed Wuxia flick and a semi-obscure 1980s slasher. There is no deep philosophical message. It is a bunch of roided out commandos facing off against an alien. Prey should have followed much the same mold, but with Comanche hunters in lieu of 1980s super commandos. What does Prey in is something that I have complained about in a few reviews now. That is bloat, and artistic delusion. There are seemingly no more workmanlike directors these days, and editing seems to have completely disappeared. Prey is an 80 minute Full Moon-style cheese fest that runs for about twenty minutes too long. Once we have established why the characters are going into the woods, when we have established that Naru harbors ambitions of being a hunter like her brother, and to the annoyance of some of the other young men in the village, do we really need to stop and spell it out again and again? Could some of the bits with the French fur trappers not have been condensed? Not everything is arthouse cinema, nor should it need to be. Not every film needs overlong establishing shots and purple exposition. Sometimes, a cheesy, schlocky sci-fi horror flick should just be that.
This is the frustration that I had with Prey. The actors were decent, the film was not totally hideous, the action scenes were alright, and the CGI was not as embarrassing as some of Disney’s MCU offerings. At a lean 80 to 85 minutes, Prey could have been a well paced little sci-fi action (or sci-fi horror) creature flick. A nice little throwback to some of the better direct to VHS offerings that those of us who grew up in that era remember. It may have even been further improved by removing the predator trappings and just having it be a film about some Comanche hunters facing off against some sort of beast from Native-American folklore. However, Hollywood can not do a decent one and done flick these days. Everything must be part of a franchise. As such, what could have been an entertaining film is simply a thing that exists.
Until the next ill-advised sequel…
Score: 4.5/10