“If the Colombians did all this, then why'd they leave their boss Ramon over there hanging ten and his girlfriend naked on the floor?”

The first Predator did well enough to warrant a sequel, and under a new director, new cast, and new setting, Predator 2 arrived in 1990 to butcher, gut & take the heads of audiences. Set in the grim future of 1997 and moving the story to LA during a gang war & heat wave, does the movie bring enough new stuff to the franchise to keep it fresh and interesting?

Plot
Los Angeles. Heat wave. Gang war. Against this backdrop, we have a tough cowboy cop who doesn’t want to wait around for stuff like “permission” to go in and bust the bad guys. He’s got a like-minded team of officers with him, including a new guy who never shuts up. However, something arrives in town and starts following our Hero, killing various criminals and playing a deadly game of cat and mouse. Also, a government agent obfuscates things by hunting the creature for his own reasons.

Characters
Lieutenant Mike Harrigan: Danny Glover in the Hero’s position. He’s a foul-mouthed cop who’s on the edge of getting suspended for his reckless behavior. Still, he’s a good cop, one of the best on the force. As soon as he suspects that there’s a fourth party (the Predator) involved in the gang war, he starts trying to investigate. He’s also got a fear of ledges/high places that comes back every now and then. He’s likable and Glover seems to have fun with the role, he’s just not as primally badass as Arnold, though.

Danny Archuleta: Ruben Blades is Harrigan’s best friend on the force, the more level headed of the duo. He’s the first major character offed by the Predator, which is pretty much what makes things personal for Harrigan.

Maria Conchita Alonso: Leona Cantrell is the third member of Harrigan’s team, a tough, ball-busting tom boy.

Jerry Lambert: Bill Paxton is the Rookie, another cowboy cop who asked to get transferred to central so he could get some glory. Loudmouthed, fast talking, lecherous, he starts off kind of annoying before getting kind of likable.

Tony Pope: Morton Downey, Jr. is an obnoxious, muck raking television host who’s trying to get the scoop on these killings. He’s fun in an over-the-top hammy way, and gets a hilarious comeuppance when Harrigan decks him.

Peter Keys: Gary Busey is the smartass, gung-ho FBI agent who’s trying to track and catch the Predator. Obviously it doesn’t go very well for him, but he & Harrigan butt heads a lot.

King Willie: Calvin Lockhart is the Jamaican drug lord of LA, and a Voodoo priest. Yeah, its over the top.

Garber: Firefly’s Adam Baldwin is Keys’ right hand man. Doesn’t do a whole lot, just wanted to point out that Jayne is in this film

The Predator: Kevin Peter Hall returned as the alien hunter, but plays a completely different character. This Predator, while still lurking in the shadows with his active camouflage, is also, dare I say, more likable. He’s curious about human culture, recording a lot more dialog from characters and repeating it back (hell, he makes saying “want some candy” brutally creepy), and he also plays more mind games with his target as well as having more toys to play with. The Predator is the badass of the movie, without question. Sadly, Hall, who was also Harry from Harry and the Hendersons, died in 1991 of AIDS from a blood transfusion, which sucks.

Visuals/Effects
The director this time was Stephen Hopkins (who did Nightmare on Elm Street 5), and while it wasn’t quite as atmospheric as McTiernan’s version, its still pretty good. There are a lot more characters in the film, but fewer main ones. The end result being a slightly lesser level of pacing, but it still moves fairly quickly from action scene to action scene. Fight scenes are generally rather good, with the Predator getting more opportunities to shine. However, the fight on the subway train just didn’t work for me. I can see what they were going for with the lights turned off and chaos ensuing, but it was too blurred and dark to see what was going on.

Stan Winston’s team once more delivered on the visual effects for the Predator, coming up with a new look and new gear. The face under the mask was more advanced this time (and earning a new nickname from Harrigan: Pussyface). Then the movie gets to the interior of a Predator ship, that’s a field trip.

Writing
Jim & John Thomas once again wrote the script, and the dialog continues to move quickly (and profanely) along. The writing’s ok, continuing the blend of action, sci-fi and horror, with a dash of superheroics thrown in with the Predator bounding around and murdering criminals like some kind of skull-taking Batman.

Sound
Alan Silvestri returns for another action packed, percussive score. It doesn’t quite have the same fire as the first one though.

Conclusion
Predator 2 does not suck. The first one was awesome and the second, while not as good and containing a few meh moments, still delivers on the whole “alien comes to Earth to hunt worthy prey” with lots of action and blood and explosions and weird SCIENCE. Its quite fun.

“This stuff will make you a god damned sexual Tyrannosaurus, just like me.”

I know what you want. You want a movie starring two elected governors running around the jungle with a bunch of sweaty muscular dudes trying to fight off a monster. Well, in 1987, John McTiernan delivered the backscratcher for that itch. That’s right kids, its time for Predator.

Plot
So there’s a squad of elite special forces operatives sent to some South American nation to rescue some dudes that have been captured by the bad guys. Which bad guys? You know, the bad guys. That’s not important. They go into the jungle, find the bad guy camp and find out that it wasn’t a rescue mission but a bit of wetworks to stop an army from invading a friendly nation. It’s standard military action movie stuff, but the very beginning starts off with a spaceship launching a capsule at Earth, and therein lies the simple beauty of the concept. After the bad guys get taken care of, the squad is beset by an unknown third party that starts picking them off one by one and skinning them and/or taking their skulls.

Characters
Dutch: Arnold Schwarzenegger is the leader of this team of badasses. Arnold makes a good leader for the team and is a convincing big scary dude. He’s not as jokey in this movie as in say, Commando but the few one-liners he has are classic (“Stick around” and “Get to the choppah!” are the standouts). Arnold may get a lot of flack, but he’s actually perfectly suited for the action movie genre, and he’s got some fantastic facial expressions.

Dillon: Carl “Apollo Creed” Weathers is an old buddy of Dutch’s who’s gone into the CIA. He’s a guy who doesn’t gel with the squad very well since his desk job has gotten him soft.

Hawkins: Shane Black is the bespectacled communications guy on the squad. He’s a nice enough fella who likes telling off-color jokes about his girlfriend’s privates. Also the first member of the squad taken down by the Predator.

Blain: Jesse “The Body” Ventura is the squad’s heavy weapons guy, a takbaky-chewin,’ Aussie-hat-wearin,’ storm-cussin’ guy who carries around a chain gun named “Old Painless.” He’d be more badass if he was in the film longer.

Mac: Bill Duke is the squad’s sergeant. A quiet man with a shaved head and a habit of dry shaving before going into battle, he’s bro’s with Blain and takes his death rather…badly.

Poncho: Richard Chaves is the Hispanic demolitions guy on the team, carting around a grenade launcher that sees a lot of use in the first battle.

Billy: Sonny Landham is the squad’s Native American tracker, which makes him essentially Spirit from the G.I. Joe cartoons. Only much, much cooler. He senses something’s wrong in the jungle before anyone else does, and does a lot of really badass stuff. It was a tough choice, but the fact that he does a lot of stuff in the movie and is probably the “Not-Arnold” soldier who gets the most screen time makes him my badass of the movie. Also, the Predator records his mighty laugh and mimics it. How badass is that?

Anna: Elpildia Carrillo is the lone survivor of the squad’s attack on the bad guys, and its kind of vague if she’s with the rebels or a prisoner or what. Anyway, she knows information about the bad guys, so Dillon decides to take her with them

The Predator: Kevin Peter Hall is our Villain, an extra-terrestrial big game hunter who travels to Earth to hunt the most dangerous game: Man! It’s a very simple premise, but one that works. Hall’s performance in the suit has a lot to do with it, as there’s definitely a lot of savagery with the creature when he leaps around like a giant ape, but also cunning. The Predator’s got the tech and the savvy to hunt humans, and he plays some mind games with his quarry, observing them, recording their voices and basically toying with them.

Visuals/Effects
First, John McTiernan knows how to film action. The pacing is tight, the atmosphere is tense and the action scenes are both full of explosions and awesomeness. There’s a lot of night scenes, but its always well lit so that you can see what’s going on.

Now, onto the big guy himself. Stan Winston’s creature shop made a masterpiece with the Predator alien. The guy’s inhuman, has a bevy of alien tech, a bitchin’ vision mode and really well done active camouflage. Even his alien blood, a Day-Glo green mix of glowstick fluid and KY jelly, is pretty awesome. He may be one ugly motherfucker, but as far as movie monsters go, he’s kickass.

Writing
The script by Jim & John Thomas is sparse. There are only a few characters and the pacing moves forward relentlessly. Dialog is sparse, but also crisp enough, and the one liners are pretty classic. Probably most importantly for making a great movie about a monster that slowly whittles down the characters, you actually like the characters being hunted. It invests you in the movie, gives you a side to root for, but also shows you that the monster isn’t just futzing around with low-threat targets (coincidentally all are things I find the slasher subgenere does horribly, terribly, unforgivably wrong).

Sound
Alan Silvestri delivers a completely appropriate action score and more percussion than you can shake a stick with a folded up leaf filled with gunpowder at. Very nice.

Also, sound effects. Yeah, haven’t covered those here in a long time. They are very awesome in this film, particularly the Predator’s signature growl that sounds like a rattlesnake purring.

Conclusion
Predator is a badass little film. It rolls action, horror and sci-fi elements together into one sweaty jungle crawl for survival. It’s a lot of fun and its nice to go back and see the franchise in its prime, before being violated by the two crossover movies with another alien franchise that should have been awesome but failed utterly. You know the ones I’m talking about. Predator doesn’t try to get all deep with a message or anything. It just delivers violence and head taking and machine guns and… Well, if any of those things appeal to you, then Predator is for you.