I think I’ve been seeing a lot of talk on the Internet about the movie recently, but it might have only been the post on the Librarian of Celaeno’s substack last October which prompted me to watch the film right away (for Nogglestead variations of immediacy) after having bought the first two films last August (before LoC’s post, actually). I was kind of hoping to watch it on a movie night with my boys, as the first film’s cultural references still echo today, but maybe that’s amongst us Uncs and not among the actual kids. Oh, but no: As it stands, they both have jobs now, and at the same fast food restaurant, so they often work on alternating nights. And when I proffered the opportunity to watch the film to my oldest, he demurred as he generally does these days–I guess forty-year-old two-hour-long action movies are a little slow compared to the scrolling of the modern Internet. So I’ll be watching films alone mostly from here on out, and here on out began a while ago.
I won’t bore you with too much about Predator: It’s almost archetypal for an action flick of the era, with big unapologetic Americans fighting South or Central American bad guys until they discover they’re fighting something else: an alien that hunts men. You know, “The Most Dangerous Game” but with that twist. It’s a solid piece from its time, and it holds up well, although I cannot tell you what (My) Kids These Days would think of it since they did not partake (the older said he has been frightened by seeing the chest bursting scene when he viewed it on some other kid’s device at the dojo when he was much younger, and I had to point out that Xenomorphs from Alien are different from the Predators, although their paths have crossed cinematically from time to time).
I’d seen that film a time or two in the past. But apart from a scene towards the end that I caught on cable at some point or another, I had never seen Predator 2, but I had seen commentary on it that it was not as good as the first. But it’s a little like comparing Alien to Aliens. The moviemakers and writers took the story in a different direction instead of trying to do Die Hard, but in an airport! On a boat! On a bus! with it.
Predator 2 is set seven years in the future–the film came out in 1990, but it is set in 1997–and downtown Los Angeles is sweltering under a heat wave and it’s a battleground between the Colombians and the Jamaican posses (Jamaican posses as baddies were very big in 1990, recent evidence suggests). When Danny Glover, playing a detective named Harrigan in the police department, and his team pursue some gang-bangers into their drug house, they find the heavily armed men have been killed by someone…or something… else. And Glover’s detective is reprimanded for not following orders. A team of Feds, led by Gary Busey, is investigating the killings with their own agenda. Basically, they know it’s an alien with advanced technology they want for the US Government. Harrigan and his team investigate, trail Busey’s team, and Bill Paxton gets killed by a Predator, completing his trifecta. It leads to a confrontation between the Predator, Busey’s team, and Harrigan in a slaughterhouse (which I’d scene part of some years ago). Then it’s Harrigan and the Predator in a chase scene, hand-to-hand combat on a large Predator ship, and…. finis? No, of course not.
Basically, a couple minutes in, I wondered if this was an off-label Lethal Weapon movie. Not only does Danny Glover play a cop just a couple of “I’m getting too old for this shit”s short of Roger Murtaugh, but Steve Kahan, who played Lieutenant Murphy, appears as a uniformed police officer early in the movie, and of course, Gary Busey played Mr. Joshua in the first Lethal Weapon. So part of the game within the game was watching for others like maybe Mary Ellen Trainor. But no such luck.
As I mentioned, the film is part of its time in having Jamaican Posses as the new urban gang antagonist.
And it was reminiscient of Highlander 2 in a sequel to a film set in the 1980s is set into a darker future which did not come to pass; 1997 (Predator 2) and 2024 (Highlander 2) have come and gone without being as bleak as predicted. Maybe that would be lesson to learn about the future from now about which we sometimes feel bleak.
At any rate, I don’t think Predator 2 was bad. It just wasn’t the first, and that would have been hard to top.
