The Predator

Writer-director Shane Black (The Nice Guys) played a small role as one of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s soldiers in John McTiernan’s original 1987 film Predator, an experience that apparently did nothing to equip him to rehabilitate this shabby franchise about human-hunting, dreadlocked aliens. Every five to 10 years, somebody gets the bad idea to revive the Predator series, but the almost fascinating ineptitude displayed by Black in The Predator makes the Alien vs. Predator duology seem like inspired filmmaking. Black and co-screenwriter Fred Dekker pile on the profane putdowns and moldy one-liners, but the film doesn’t contain a single thirty-second stretch of coherence throughout its 107-minute running time, to the point that it feels like it was cobbled together from outtakes. Olivia Munn plays an alien expert who is also Lara Croft, Jacob Tremblay is an autistic (i.e., magical) child and star Boyd Holbrook is most notable for not being Garrett Hedlund.