Elle Fanning as Thia and Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi as Dek in Predator: Badlands.20th Century Studios
Predator: Badlands
Directed by Dan Trachtenberg
Written by Patrick Aison and Brian Duffield
Starring Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi and Elle Fanning
Classification PG; 107 minutes
Opens in theatres Nov. 7
“If it bleeds, we can kill it.” No truer words have ever been spoken than the steely maxim espoused by Arnold Schwarzenegger in John McTiernan’s 1987 action masterpiece Predator, in which a group of jungle commandos go mano a mano with a slippery alien. But what happens when a killer franchise is drained of its blood? Or, more accurately, what happens when it replaces its gushy streak of crimson-red geysers with something more synthetic and safe?
Such is the case with Predator: Badlands, a sometimes inventive but too frequently anemic effort to expand the proudly R-rated Predator-verse into the mass-market appeal of PG sterility. Although no one would ever confuse the series with the artful evolution of its sister franchise, Alien, the Predator movies always guaranteed at least a healthily unhealthy dose of hardcore violence: gore, guts, guffaws.
In Predator: Badlands, the Yautja squares off against CGI beasts and androids – spilling plenty of blood, but not the red kind.20th Century Studios
Yet with Predator: Badlands, director Dan Trachtenberg – who has become the franchise’s new minder thanks to his work on the effectively nasty 2022 entry Prey and this summer’s delightfully disgusting animated anthology Killer of Killers – has ingeniously if not toothlessly taken any real violence out of the equation. Instead of everyone’s favourite intergalactic dreadlocked warrior slicing and dicing humans, the Yautja now squares off against nothing but CGI beasts and androids. Blood might still be spilled by the barrel, but because it is either neon blue or cream-coloured, Trachtenberg can walk away with a PG rating that theoretically broadens his film’s audience, even if it in practice neuters the property’s core appeal.
The lack of genuine slaughter in Badlands isn’t the film’s only problem. While it flips the franchise’s history by making the Yautja a hero instead of a villain – the threadbare story involves a warrior clan’s “runt” being exiled to a hostile planet to prove himself – there is not nearly enough tension or world-building on display to become invested in this particular game of kill-or-be-killed.
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This extends to the film’s second big turn, which pairs our heroic alien Dek (played by stuntman Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi, his face digitally replaced by the nightmarish visage of a toothy, somewhat vaginal Yautja) with a plucky robot sidekick. Named Thia, this android has been manufactured by the Alien/Predator franchise’s omnipresent corporate villain Weyland-Yutani and is played by Elle Fanning in a quip-happy performance, as if the bot is a wannabe comedian, eager for her first Brooklyn open mic. The odd-couple pairing has its initial and surprising charms, but by the time that our heroes must face off against a band of Weyland-Yutani hench-bots, the shtick becomes as thin as the animal hide that Dek wears as a battle mask.
A backwards triumph of yuks over yucks, Badlands just runs plain dry. It does not nearly rival the franchise’s darkest days of 2004’s Alien vs. Predator, but like that halfhearted spinoff’s tagline, there is a definite sense that whoever wins in the battle of Badlands, we lose. Better dead than red, I suppose.