Predator 2 Review
We’re in week #2 of my Predator review series. Predator: Badlands releases in under a month. That means today we’re talking about Predator 2 starring Danny Glover and other familiar faces. Now what do I think about this film? Is it a worthy follow-up to the original? Let’s talk about it!
The Good
The best thing about this film is that I found it to be a pleasant surprise. The 1987 original is one of the greatest movies ever made. I love that film and hold up really well. Predator 2 was a first time watch for me and I hadn’t heard much about it and that gave me a sense that maybe this film wasn’t very good. It’s not as good, exciting, or thrilling as the original but for what it is I enjoyed myself. I’m not going to be singing its praise as one of the best sequels of all time, but as an early ‘90s action movie I thought it was fun. When the film was done, I checked the Rotten Tomatoes score for the film and currently it sits at 30%. That honestly surprised me and it’s lower than I would’ve thought. I expected it to be rotten, I wasn’t expecting a great score but a score in the high 40s, low 50s would’ve been where I guessed it would’ve landed. From beginning to end I found it exciting, it delivers plenty of Predator action and carnage. The film’s cast is bigger than the original which means there’s a higher body count.
As for specifically what works about this film is that it doesn’t feel like a sequel that rehashes the original. The original is about a group of soldiers going to the jungle to fight the Predator. In this film, the Predator comes to the humans and has its carnage in New York City. It goes from the jungle to the urban jungle. Instead of having soldiers be the body count for the film it’s police officers that feel right for this story. The film might follow a pretty typical, by the numbers police investigation film but it fits the film because it’s doing something different. They very easily could’ve just done the same plot as the original where a new group of soldiers head to an island to rescue people only to discover that the island has a Predator on it, an alien from another planet. The plot feels different but even the cast here is very different. The original got Arnold Schwarzenegger, this big macho guy that’s one of the great action stars of the last 40 years. Here they go with an every man type lead with Danny Glover. He’s not an action hero, he’s just a police officer that gets swept up in this investigation with a Predator. The supporting cast has lively characters like the original but they don’t have the macho bravado that the characters from the 1987 film had. That was one of the aspects that really stood out to me about this film, they saw the success of the original and tried something different, they didn’t rehash things.
Another thing that works about this film is they found a way to expand the mythology. I feel like this film did more with expanding the mythology than the original did. They tease that there’s a spaceship that has multiple Predators and tease that they’ve been on the Earth for a long time. I wish they did a third Predator film expanding and exploring what was set up in this film, maybe they could’ve done a sequel that brings back Arnold Schwarznegger and explores all of this mythology. It’s just another layer added to the film that doesn’t make it feel like a rehash of the original and in fact it does what sequels should do. We get teases and hints of the mythology in the original. As the audience we’re wondering what these creatures are and where they come from. This film answers some of those questions and teases that they’ve been on Earth for a long time. When you get to the finale it’s not a rehash and not another brawl between Danny Glover and the Predator, rehashing the fight from the original. But it's a third act that does have the action you expect but also finds a way to expand the mythology and have a slightly bigger threat.
Finally, the cast for the film is pretty good. Danny Glover is of course a Hollywood legend who’s been in movies for a long time. He’s able to be the leading man of a movie like this, this was in the middle of the Lethal Weapon franchise. He’s a very different lead from Arnold because he’s not built like Arnold. He’s built like a normal guy that’s a New York City cop. There’s other familiar faces in here with Gary Busey and Bill Paxton that are solid actors to fill out the cast. I don’t think anybody is as memorable as Arnold or Carl Weathers from the original but for what Predator 2 is trying to be, I think they do a good enough job.
The Bad
The big thing here is that as a police investigation film, the mystery of the film doesn’t work at all. The characters in the movie are seeing all of these people die and have to figure out what happened. The audience watching the movie knows what happened and who did it. There’s not really a mystery in the film because the audience is always steps ahead of the characters in the film. I think that’s a fundamental flaw with the film when you do an investigation film like this because there’s no way to keep the killer of the movie a secret because everybody bought a ticket or clicked on a film called Predator 2. The film can lack a bit of tension and forward momentum as we’re waiting for the Predator to show up and for Danny Glover to figure out what’s really going on. Because of that, the film isn’t as engaging as the original and you don’t care about these characters as much.
The other problem here is that the film’s budget was way too low for what the film wanted to do. In the third there’s multiple Predators that show up and they emerge from the fog to make it creepier but the CGI and how they appear from the fog is some of the most distracting CGI of the last 35 years. It’s not that it’s CGI that feels dated and when it came out in 1990 it probably looked good. No, the CGI just looks straight up bad and it feels like something that people could do better in photoshop in the year 2025 then what CGI artists could do in 1990. What’s interesting is that the budget is $35 million, double what the original budget was and yet the original looks better and I don’t know why. I’m curious why that is, maybe they tried to be too ambitious for their own good but it’s a film that has double the budget but looks half as worse.
Finally, the film as a whole isn’t as memorable as the original. Maybe that’s unrealistic expectations to set for the film given that the original is one of the action classics. But the film doesn’t have the memorable sequences or the memorable characters and dialogue of the original. If I’m in the mood for late ‘80s, early ‘90s Predator films I’m going to watch the original and not this film because the original is a better film on almost every single level.
Final Thoughts: Predator 2 is a good enough, entertaining enough sequel. It’s not as good as the original but compared to some of the other films that I’ve watched in this franchise it’s not bad. This is the film of the franchise that’s sort of just there for me. It doesn’t make any big mistakes but it also doesn’t do anything that makes it a great sequel. Everything about it is just good enough and fine.
The Score: 8.0/10 (B-)
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