Essay: The Pros & Cons Of ‘Predator 2’

You know, it’s true, he really is one ugly mother f—

Photo: 20th Century Fox

I do not regret renting Predator 2 on Amazon Prime yesterday. It was worth the money. The last time I saw Predator 2 was decades ago. I watched it on VHS tape a few years after it tanked at the box office. Now that I think about it, I did not regret watching it then, but I was 18 years old, a bashful theatre kid whose primary hobby was mixing vast quantities of stage blood. (My recipe: corn syrup, red and blue food coloring, cocoa powder).

I am a fully grown man now. I don’t have time for hobbies like homemade special effects. I’m a serious writer of a modest subscription-based newsletter about movies.

The 1990 sequel to Predator, the 1987 mega-hit, did not star Arnold Schwarzenegger, who had played a mercenary fighting an interplanetary hunter stalking the jungles of South America. Predator is one of the best invincible muscleman action movies of the Reagan era, a perfect genre mashup of tough guys with guns taking care of business and sci-fi monster movies.

Predator 2 also happened without Predator’s director, John McTiernan, who also directed cerebral action classics like The Hunt for Red October and, of course, Die Hard, the action movie that changed action movies forever, transforming America’s strong, silent, bulletproof badasses into more realistic regular Joes, without sacrificing gore or body count. McTiernan and Schwarzenneger were hot properties when Predator 2 was in the planning stages and too expensive, which was too bad at the time, but everything worked out for the best. Fans of Predator got a sequel, which wasn’t what they expected—except plenty of R-rated mayhem. And guns. Lots of guns.

Predator 2 is not a bad movie. I can see why someone would think it would be, but it isn’t. It is a pretty imaginative follow-up that pays homage to its predecessor, but it’s also a snappy, hyper-violent B-movie that stands on its own. A Predator sequel with Ah-nuld in 1990 would have been the Ah-nuld show, which was a show I enjoyed very much. But without the original’s big star and visionary director, Predator 2 was able to be mean and nasty while also setting up an entire Predator extended universe years before it became a lucrative trend.

The plot takes place ten years after the rumble in the jungle of the first movie. This time, the jungle is Los Angeles, 1997, a near-future urban hellscape devastated by powerful drug gangs. The movie opens with a shootout between gangsters and cops— there are more explosions in these scenes than in Apocalypse Now.

In the middle of this war drops the title creature — the star attraction — a giant, invisible, technologically advanced alien reptile Sasquatch, a member of an extraterrestrial race that hunts dangerous prey all over the universe. In Predator, the prey was a bunch of Special Forces commandos, and in Predator 2, it’s everyone that terrified ’80s conservatives.

In fact, Predator 2’s primary flaw is its confused politics and tone. The street gangs in Predator 2 are straight out of a racist narc’s erotic dreams, just dozens and dozens of disposable men of color, all cocaine-snorting zombies with grenade launchers.

One scene leans into Robocop-style satire: a subway full of tired and weary commuters all pull guns out of their briefcases and purses to shoot a gang and then the Predator. The guns don’t help. But that moment of commentary is lost in a movie that predicts a future of runaway drug crime, which did not happen in real life.

The voodoo-obsessed Jamaican mobsters are a particularly grotesque stereotype. This would ruin the movie if it weren’t for a surprisingly diverse cast of good guys, which was still rare in 1990.

Just to be clear, the Predator isn’t racist. He’s skinning and gutting kingpins and henchmen, but he’s just as happy going on a police officer safari. To the Predator, all humans are game.

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Predator 2’s biggest pro is Danny Glover. Glover was a serious stage and screen actor who became super famous as the grouchy veteran detective Roger Murtaugh in the 1987 blockbuster Lethal Weapon opposite Mel Gibson’s trigger-happy hothead Martin Riggs. When we first meet his character, he’s on the verge of retirement until Gibson’s knucklehead gets in his way.

He’d go on to make three more Lethal Weapon sequels. Even though he was a star before Predator 2, it was still unusual for Hollywood to give the leading role in a high-concept shoot ‘em up to a man of color, especially an actor who can really act.

Danny Glover is driven, lean, and intense as Lieutenant Mike Harrigan, a killing machine cop with an arsenal in the trunk of his car. He’s a loose cannon! Harrigan is also sweaty. The dude is always sweating through his shirts. L.A. is hot! But kicking criminal ass? Good cardio. I wish Glover had gotten the chance to do more action without wild-eyed hunk muppet Gibson tagging along.

Glover is given a couple of unfortunate macho one-liners about dicks and asses, and he does call the Predator “pussyface,” but, hey, it’s a quasi-reactionary Bush Senior-era action movie about crime and drugs and actual illegal aliens. Think of it as a motion picture museum exhibit.

The supporting cast is also solid, much like Predator, which boasted classic performances from badasses like Jesse Ventura and Carl Weathers. As Glover’s character’s partners, Rubén Blades and Maria Conchita are immediately engaging, battle-hardened and human. Bill Paxton shows up as a young hotshot, and he’s delightful. Then, suddenly, Gary Busey barges in as a Fed with a secret, and the man is a beautiful maniac. I had also completely forgotten that pioneering trash talk TV troll Morton Downey Jr. has a bit part as a tabloid journalist. If you don’t know who Morton Downey Jr. was, look him up on YouTube. He knew where the culture was going.

Predator 2 never forgets it's a Predator movie and recycles bits from the first movie that were popular. There are lots of humans hanging upside down like freshly killed deer ready to be butchered and creepy infrared footage from the Predator’s POV, and even though we know what a Predator looks like, the reveal is just as weird and scary as the first time. Glover also gets to reference one of Ah-nuld’s most famous lines in an unnecessary but completely satisfying callback.

Oh, there’s also a Predator self-surgery scene. I love Predator self-surgery scenes. It was one of my favorite sequences from Predator. They have these medical devices that look painful as hell but what do I know about Predator physiology? Nothing. Predators have glowing green blood, which looks cool but seems like a disadvantage for a species proud of its ability to camouflage itself.

I don’t think director Stephen Hopkins got enough credit for directing more than a few action sequences that were grueseom and inventive, including the slaughter of a group of government soldiers trained to take down the Predator. The first movie was visually original — monster maker Stan Winston’s Predator costume made the movie— but the action was still mostly dudes shooting guns in the jungle. Hopkins gives his audience plenty of Predator money shots but also throws in a scene where Danny Glover turns a doorless, bullet-riddled car into a battering ram. It’s a pretty good moment. Another good one? A fight between Glover and the Predator inside a fully operational and wholly abandoned slaughterhouse crowded with sides of beef dangling from hooks. LOL, we get it, Stephen! Meat is meat!

There is one quick shot of the Predator crouching on a skyscraper’s gargoyle that is iconic — real goth shit — and I appreciated that. I wanted to mention that. Once again, Stephen, bravo. I also thought you did a great job with 1998’s epic sci-fi flick Lost in Space, and, you know, I liked A Nightmare On Elm Street 5: The Dream Child. (I’m a big fan of that series.)

The climax of Predator 2 happens on an alien spacecraft. One moment, Glover is tracking the wounded Predator across rooftops and into windows and down elevator shafts; the next, our human hero is wandering around a strange spaceship complete with advanced technologies, cryptic graphs, and fog, budget-friendly fog covering the floor of the spacecraft for no good reason, I guess Predators need extremely powerful humidifiers, I don’t know. Now that I think about it, there’s a lot of decorative fog in Predator 2. I’m not hating.

For a moment, before the final battle, Glover sees something and then immediately understands everything: in a trophy case, he sees a giant monster’s skull that is not of this earth, a bleached human skull, and then the elongated skull of a xenomorph from the Alien movies. That was a thunderclap heard by nerds all around the world. Predator 2 suggested that, in the past, the two alien species had fought, and it blew minds. Fans of both franchises would dine on that brief reveal for years until 2004, when Alien v. Predator came out, which wasn’t a bad movie either, but I’ll write about it some other time.

Predator 2’s pro: Danny Glover’s unconventional casting as a lunatic cop. It’s con? Predator 2 is peak War on Drugs “copaganda”. Here’s another pro: the violence is nonstop. That could be a con, too, depending on your appetite for graphic cinematic butchery. So consider yourself warned: this movie is awesome. I do not think you’ll regret watching it and if you do, feel free to leave a comment. I may respond.

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