The Sillier Adventures of the Predator

[setsuled]

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Three separate Predators set out to hunt three different human warriors in 2025's Predator: Killer of Killers, an animated film from directors Dan Trachtenberg and Joshua Wassung. Trachtenberg was the mastermind behind the popular Predator movie Prey a couple years ago and the writing on Killer of Killers is just as ridiculous. The animated format may be better suited to cartoonish logic but I found the third segment of the film too vigorously lame.

Like Prey, Killer of Killers features some actors with tenuous connexions to the ethnicities they're portraying. Louis Ozawa, an American actor of Japanese and Chinese descent, plays a pair of samurai brothers, the only voice role in the mostly wordless second and best segment of the film. Set in 1609 in no more specific place than "in Japan", a detail that may be less obtrusive to those of you not living in Japan, the story follows the lives of the two men whose father has pitted against each other for the right of succession to shogun. The two learn the value of working together against the extraterrestrial foe, who in one shot is visually linked to their psychopathic father. It's not a story that fits well in feudal Japan, nor does it seem right for a Predator movie, particular in its posing the Predator as a thematic ghost of the boys' father. But the action sequences are the best of the film.

I preferred the concept of the first story, in which a Viking matriarch is robbed of her moment of glorious revenge but the sudden intrusion of a Predator. I liked the idea of the alien foe also disrupting culture and tradition.

The third segment, about a young fighter pilot in World War II, was just a relentless stream of stupid ideas. On this kid's first flight, he wears no helmet, everyone in the squadron is able to communicate with each other without apparent headsets; at one point the boy crawls out onto the wing of his plane in midflight in order to fix something. He also somehow knows that the Predator's vision is based on heat so he decides to cut his engines, apparently making his aircraft ice cold. Sure, it didn't make a lot of sense when Schwarzenegger was able to hide behind cold mud but at least he felt constrained to also be still when the Predator was looking directly at him.

It's not a very satisfying film but it's a good accomplishment for animation studio Third Floor.

Predator: Killer of Killers is available on Hulu in the U.S. and on Disney+ elsewhere in the world.