To be fair, I was not watching the second one with 1980s eyes and expectations, but rather present-day ones, in a world where acting (particularly) has come on in leaps and bounds. But more on that later. This time it’s set in an urban jungle rather than a green one, and the first half hour is complete chaos, depicting gang warfare and the Los Angeles police trying to sort it out in the sweltering summer heat.
In the middle of all this bonkers chaos, our same shimmering, invisible Predator turns up, for some reason ("He's in town with a few days to kill" says the tagline!) and starts slaughtering the members of the cartel. I’m not sure why - perhaps I don’t know enough about the Predator lore to understand why it turns up at that specific point on Earth, in that place and at that time.
The whole first half of the film is fairly boring, frankly, and plays out more like a "buddy cop" film than anything else. The characters are cheesy and typecast. They feel more like they are on the set of the TV series CHiPs, for example. The acting by everyone - yes, even the leads - is terrible, the script is awful and the editing is embarrassingly poor. At one point, for instance, there’s a cop standing to the side clearly awaiting his cue to walk into the hub of the action and deliver his lines. The setting looks like a poorly created studio - and yes, all very late-80s.
When the creature turns up, it does get more interesting, but during the first half, there isn’t much of that. Instead, we get Danny Glover as the cop "playing by his own rules", defying orders and doing as he likes - it’s so samey-samey! He is probably the most convincing actor in the cast, but because his character is so tediously typecast, it makes his performance look totally second-rate, sadly.
The rest of the cast - much like I was reflecting on with King Kong recently (spookily enough, released the same year as this) - just look and feel like actors "acting". They are not at all convincing and, like King Kong, are performing on sets that are equally unconvincing. The members of the Jamaican gang, for example - supposedly hardened criminals - look just like actors in make-up and costumes. I do think that these days acting has come so much further, and we generally expect, at least in well-produced films and TV, to be convinced by the characters. But maybe that’s just me.
Anyway, back to the plot. The body count rises, there is tedious buddy-cop wrangling between enforcement agencies (it’s always the same and has been done so many times) and more poor acting. Suddenly, our hero realises that they’re not after a man, but something otherworldly. Aha! Took him long enough! They end up trying to freeze our cuddly Predator with liquid nitrogen. As we might expect, the creature dispatches 1,001 enemies with ease, but in the showdown with our hero, it suddenly can’t even get just one more - giving him the chance to overpower it!
It’s not really scary as a film or story. In fact, the scariest bit is towards the end during a "vertigo" type scene with our hero creeping along a ledge with a sheer drop just one slip away! Then we get to the finale, where we see more of the creature's situation and the very interesting interior of its craft. No points for guessing what happens. I did wonder earlier why the creature refused to kill a woman because it detected she was pregnant - it was never really explained.
I think once we got away from the buddy-cop tropes and the tedious characters - specifically in the last third of the film - things looked up. Adventure was rife, and as unlikely as some of the outcomes were and as many plot holes as were exposed, this was by far the most entertaining segment. It could almost be watched in isolation. Oh yes, and then just ignore the tedious last scene when it briefly revisits the previous characters. In the finale, a 1712 flintlock pistol is thrown at him as a trophy, which I noticed turned up in Predator: Killer of Killers (2025) the other day - so there is a hook there.
But for me, the spoiler was the acting and characters. While a great actor, Danny Glover doesn't really work for me as a gritty action hero. Shouting at everyone and sweating profusely, he seems more stressed-out than in charge of the situation. And everyone else? It feels like their next job was on the set of Fame or a Porky’s film.
Jump forward to more recent Predator films I’ve seen, such as Prey (2022), and what a difference. Totally jaw-dropping engagement, superb acting and a great story, plot and editing. It’s a world away from this. Maybe I’m being unfair as it’s 35 years old, but it reminded me why I find many films from the 1980s so tedious to endure - though there are, of course, exceptions.
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