WARNING: The following article contains spoilers for Shane Black’s The Predator, in theaters now.
The Predator franchise has been celebrated for its unflinching depiction of violence since it launched in 1987. That said, the latest installment in the franchise, director Shane Black's The Predator, proves to be the goriest to date, balancing the tougher, bloodier sequences with a steady undercurrent of pitch-black humor.
From its opening scene, the series' signature sci-fi action hits the ground running as a fugitive Predator comes across a U.S. Special Forces team in Mexico. One soldier is left skinned and hanging upside down, as seen in previous entries, but where the filmmakers really exceed visceral expectations is when the sequence takes an unexpected turn: Team leader Quinn McKenna (Boyd Holbrook) grabs a Predator arm cannon and fires a blast at his extraterrestrial opponent, accidentally blowing in half the skinned corpse of his comrade. With entrails exposed, the cadaver drips blood and viscera on the unconscious alien hunter on the jungle floor below.
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The bloody action, of course, escalates beyond the film's prologue. After the fugitive Predator is taken into captivity for observation, it revives when its pursuer, the ultimate Predator, enters Earth's atmosphere. What follows is the largest body count in the franchise's history, as the liberated hunter single-handedly slices through soldiers and scientists alike with its bladed wrist attachment and whatever makeshift armaments it can get its hands on. By the end of its escape, the top-secret government facility is littered with corpses, and blood spattered in across walls and floor.
Once outside, the body count subsides, but the intensity of the action itself does not, particularly toward the film's climax. Once the sequel's main antagonist, the genetically enhanced ultimate Predator, turns its attention squarely toward the human characters, hunting season is back in full swing. The bigger, badder hunter interrupts a battle royale between Quinn's crew of misfits and the government soldiers led by Will Traeger (Sterling K. Brown), impaling one hapless victim with a wrist-fired harpoon cable that then decapitates soldiers whose jeep races past the line at high speed.
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The alien then offers the surviving human characters a head start while it eliminates evidence of its species on Earth, soon stalking the soldiers through the Tennessee woods like an extraterrestrial slasher. In a series first, the hunter uses its iconic mandibles to bite the head off one soldier, while a futuristic disc completely blows another to bloody smithereens. The monster then turns its attention to Quinn's team, impaling one member (Thomas Jane) on a tree branch and gutting another (Keegan-Michael Key).
The final battle with the ultimate Predator proves no less graphic, with one of the last surviving members of Quinn's team, played by Augusto Aguilera, cut in half when the alien activates his spacecraft's shielding. Quinn's son Rory (Jacob Tremblay) turns this trick back around on the creature after the ship crashes back to Earth, using the energy shielding to slice off the Predator's arm before the wounded alien is ultimately shot in the head by Quinn, putting down the ultimate Predator in all its florescent, bloody glory.
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The Predator franchise has always been one of unabashed machismo and, like any testosterone-fueled spectacle, there has been a recurring sense of competition for the film series to top itself in its depictions of sci-fi violence. The latest entry certainly embraces the humor and sheer ridiculousness of its central premise more than any other entry, but Black knows audiences will come expecting the gore as well.
In that sense, The Predator delivers, firing on all cylinders to remind audiences that the titular extraterrestrials are still the biggest, baddest hunters in the game, with the hefty body count to prove it. Blood flows freely in this film, and Black succeeds in outdoing his predecessors without making the onscreen violence unsavory or off-putting, which may be The Predator's single greatest accomplishment.
Directed by Shane Black from a script he wrote with Fred Dekker, The Predator stars Boyd Holbrook, Trevante Rhodes, Jacob Tremblay, Keegan-Michael Key, Olivia Munn, Sterling K. Brown, Alfie Allen, Thomas Jane, Augusto Aguilera, Jake Busey, and Yvonne Strahovski. The film is out in theaters everywhere now.