Predator: Badlands (2025)
By William Pattison
This time I got the latest film in the Predator Franchise.
A young Predator outcast from his clan finds an unlikely
ally on his journey in search of the ultimate adversary.
I have to admit I had limited expectations with this film. I
knew Disney would make this film a lot less brutal than the other films in the
series and make it a typical coming of age adventure with a Predator as the
main character. I wasn’t disappointed. It was exactly that. But it was a smidge
better than that, and I mean a smidge. We start out with our main character who
is a young Predator who has failed his training and is set to be beheaded by
his father when his brother intervenes and is killed in his stead the brother,
before dying throws his younger brother into a ship and sends him to a killer
planet to prove himself by killing and bring back the ultimate killer species
on this planet.
One good this this filmmaker does is create a nasty environment
for this film. Pretty much everything on this planet is out to kill you, even
the very grass is like razor blades.
Also the filmmaker managed to put in lots of blood, but it
is all white, green, blue, and black, no red blood allowed because there is not
one human in sight…
I thought the actor playing the young Predator did an
acceptable job. He was not the Predator we’ve come to know in the earlier
movies, the ultimate hunter. This guy has a lot of faults and needs the help of
a simulant from the company from the Alien Franchise.
The simulant , who is played by Ell Fanning plays the part
of information source, and comedy, happy, sidekick. Also, Fanning plays her “sister”
simulant who is essentially the film’s villain.
All in all I was entertained by this film but this film
doesn’t feel like a Predator film. It feels like a film full of buddy action,
lots of cool visuals, and plenty of fighting, but the things that make a good Predator
film is missing, so with that said I cannot in good conscience recommend it. I
enjoyed what I saw but what I saw wasn’t even close to what it was supposed to
be and what is really annoying is this film was done by the director of Prey,
which was a really well done Predator film.
