Predator 2

Rating

Director

Strephen Hopkins

Screenplay

Jim Thomas, John Thomas

Length

1h 48m

Starring

Kevin Peter Hall, Danny Glover, Gary Busey, Ruben Blades, Maria Conchita Alonso, Bill Paxton, Robert Davis, Adam Baldwin, Kent McCord, Morton Downey Jr., Calvin Lockhart

MPAA Rating

R

Review

PREFACE:
In the early 2000s, I was writing reviews for an outfit called Apollo Guide Reviews. That website has since been closed down.

Attempting to reconstruct those reviews has been an exercise in frustration. Having sent them to Apollo Guide via email on a server I no longer have access to (and which probably doesn’t have records going back that far), my only option was to dig through The Wayback Machine to see if I could find them there. Unfortunately, while I found a number of reviews, a handful of them have disappeared into the ether. At this point, almost two decades later, it is rather unlikely that I will find them again.

Luckily, I was able to locate my original review of this particular film. Please note that I was not doing my own editing at the time, Apollo Guide was. As such, there may be more than your standard number of grammatical and spelling errors in this review. In an attempt to preserve what my style had been like back then, I am not re-editing these reviews, which are presented as-is.

REVIEW:
Los Angeles is a seething metropolis where the drug war is rampant and the vicious cycle of death is abundant. Predator 2 finds the alien hunter stalking the war-hungry citizens of L.A. with a fervour that can only be escaped by the most talented of individuals.

Danny Glover plays Lieutenant Mike Harrigan, a tough-as-nails cop who’s caught in the middle of a war on drugs that pits rival gangs with heavy weapons against one another. He is accompanied by his co-workers Danny (Ruben Blades), Leona (Maria Conchita Alonso) and newbie Jerry Lambert (Bill Paxton) to investigate the strange killing of some of these nefarious gang members. Their deaths are made even more mysterious when the FBI sends in a team lead by Peter Keyes (Gary Busey) to track down the culprits.

Constantly at odds, Keyes and Harrigan work against each other, each trying to solve the crime before the other, with Harrigan only discovering well into the effort that Keyes knows far more about the creature responsible than he has let on. When Harrigan discovers the truth, it leaves him undaunted in his desire to stop this menace from plaguing his city and to seek revenge for the deaths of his friends.

Predator 2 features an abundance of noted actors all slumming in roles suitable for direct-to-video releases. Glover does everything he can to eek out a good performance but with such hackneyed lines, he can’t help but look foolish for trying. Blades and Alonso force their talent into stereotypical roles that in any other film would be seen as condescending. Paxton and Busey play up their roles, understanding the absurdity of their lines; they don’t let the mundane kitsch get them down.

The story is a re-hash of so many action films where the predator stalks its prey because of its use of weapons of violence against innocent people. It displays ordinary citizens trying to protect themselves as vigilantes while making criminals more insane than they already are. There is not an inch of this film that doesn’t scream ‘prejudiced’ and it certainly doesn’t exude quality. When watching a sequel that is this profoundly unnecessary, viewers can’t help but relinquish their minds to the numbness of its form.

Predator 2 spits out every known cliché, causing the audience to flinch at every utterance. The movie certainly should have been produced direct-to-video. The filmmakers have tortured the audience with their banal ramblings and pointlessness, and hopefully most viewers will make every attempt to exorcise the picture from their memory.

Review Written

November 11, 2003