The Predator

The clearest skip in the franchise, and the disappointment is sharper because of who made it. Shane Black acted in the 1987 original, playing the one member of the squad who tells jokes, and he went on to write and direct some of the best action comedies of the last thirty years. This should have worked.

What arrived is incoherent in a way that suggests the finished film is not the one shot. The third act was reworked and refilmed after poor test screenings, and the join is obvious: characters change motivation between scenes, a plot about evolutionary upgrades is introduced and abandoned, and the ending sets up a sequel that never came. The Black dialogue is there, and in another film the banter between a squad of psychiatric patients would land, but it is pulling against a plot that keeps stopping to explain itself.

The production was also overshadowed by a serious failure of duty of care. A performer with a relevant criminal conviction was cast without the lead actress being told, and the scene was removed only after she raised it publicly, at considerable professional cost to herself. It is part of the record of this film and should not be left out of an account of it.

Nothing in the series depends on it, the Trachtenberg films ignore its additions entirely, and there is no reason to watch it.