Released in 1987, John McTiernan’s Predator is a lean, sinewy pulp masterpiece, pitting a top-form crew of Hollywood’s finest hunks against an otherworldly menace out for human blood. Applying the teen slasher model atop a base of brawny, bellicose swagger, the film managed to embody a decade’s worth of macho American bravado, while also subverting Reagan-era jingoism, through a loose allegory encompassing contemporaneous military exploits and the still-recent defeat in Vietnam. As with the similarly potent Robocop, which also boldly made its points without need for a sequel, the follow-up is less successful on all these fronts, settling for a maximalist approach that hews closer to standard D-t-V trash. Yet as trash it’s also a standout embodiment of the finest era of American action filmmaking, a period in which societal fears and doubts were filtered through a phantasmagoria of grotesque, cartoonish violence.
Ignoring the boundaries of reason and good taste, this is the kind of sequel that should have closed out the possibility of further franchise expansion, one in which the mythos is only haltingly advanced and the scale of the action cannot really be topped. It also bombed upon release. Yet somehow, due to some intrinsic allure of the monster or a general drift toward over-franchising, the opposite has occurred. With the recent release of Prey, a successful prequel reimagining that hews close to the formula of the original, there are now seven Predator movies, including a semi-reboot and two mashups with the Alien series. In that sense, Predator 2 is the Aliens to that film’s Alien, the explosion of a compact standalone piece into the wider world of mainstream shoot-‘em-up fare.
It also functions as a reversal of the expansion experienced by the Rambo movies, and in this case the political and satirical edge of the action is expanded, rather than expunged. Opening on a helicopter shot of rows of verdant palms, director Stephen Hopkins pulls a quick fake out as a setting far less lush than the original’s dense jungle is revealed: the steaming wreckage of Los Angeles circa 1997, a powder keg of a city in the middle of an oppressive heat wave. This is a rare subtle touch amid the sea of goonish excess that will follow. The story kicks off amid a chaotic police siege, in which the Colombian cartel holed up in a warehouse is able to hold off the cops with vastly superior weaponry. Luckily the Predator appears, wiping out all the bad guys, while leaving behind a scene of carnage that puzzles veteran officer Mike Harrigan (Danny Glover), doing a takeoff of his character from the Lethal Weapon series.
The immediate shift in tone in this opening set piece signals the chaotic energy of the sequel, with a caricatural, Scarface-aping looniness spotlighting thugs vacuuming up literal facefuls of blow. Key to this new aesthetic, playing off fears of mounting urban crime that defined the crack epidemic, is the mostly-pointless decision to set the film in the near future, which leads to haphazard attempts to make the tech slightly more futuristic, amplifying the bizarro comic-book style. Toting an otherwise standard handgun outfitted with a laser pistol sight, Harrigan sits at the center of an overstuffed gang of fellow cops, led by cowboy detective Jerry Lambert (Bill Paxton) and DEA Agent Peter Keyes (Gary Busey), as well as Ruben Blades, Maria Conchita Alonso, Adam Baldwin and Robert Davi. None of these characters really matter much, except as authoritarian ballast against the crowded cast of disposable non-Predator villains, and create a distracting parallel with the first movie’s elite unit dynamics, especially due to the film’s stinginess in killing them off.
This is one of the few areas where the Predator 2 pulls its punches. More interesting is the exploding turf war between the Colombians and the insurgent “Jamaican Voodoo Posse,” a cadre of psychotic, sacrifice-happy Rastas outfitted with an all-purpose occult mystique. To point out that voodoo is a Haitian practice would be beside the point. Both gangs also seem to be carrying out a parallel war over who can assemble the most outlandish outfits, with no clear winner in this regard. The resulting showdown is like West Side Story passed through the haze of cocaine psychosis, and each trip back to the comparably drab environs of the police station only diminishes the cumulative effect of this feverishly imagined sicko wonderland.
A better movie would have centered the two factions in their war in their battle against the alien interloper, but instead Predator 2 aims for a mystery thriller in which Harrigan has to get to the bottom of a situation of which the viewer is already apprised. This feels like the script getting in its own way, although the core duo of Glover and Busey do manage to hold their own. The former again manages to mesh a convincing world-weariness over demanding action work, while the latter gnashes scenery with garish aplomb. The film finally finds its firmest footing in the extended climactic chase scene, where Harrigan tracks the wounded creature through a series of vibrant LA locations, culminating in a showdown on the alien ship.
In the end, Predator 2 feels like an aimless tangent compared to its predecessor, but rarely do unnecessary remixes exhibit such insane and original verve. It’s possible to draw a tenuous connection from one to the other, plotting the way decades of South American adventurism led to the tide of narcotics sweeping American streets. Yet this kind of caustic political statement is too out there even for this gonzo level of mainstream filmmaking, and no real attempt is made to draw a coherent connection. In the end, the incoherence is ultimately key to the overall effect. This era of Hollywood action is defined by bombastic, nonsensical plotlines that transcend social realities, and while carryover screenwriter brothers Jim and John Thomas handle the format better than most, the fact remains that this type of fantasy doesn’t really jibe with making precise political points. Instead it’s pure id splashed up on the screen, a war between monsters and men that absurdly dramatizes the darkest corners of the soul. At the center of that struggle sits the Predator, the hideous reflection of some essential quality of the human psyche, a beast that must be slain again and again, yet can never be entirely conquered.
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