The Predator is probably the stupidest movie I’ve seen since spring, and that’s saying a lot (The Meg, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom). Trailers (here, here, and here) and the movie poster give away what passes for a plot. Sniper Quinn McKenna (Boyd Holbrook) runs into a predator on one of his missions, gets locked up, and meets up with a group of random nutcases. The predator kills a bunch of people, and then a bigger predator shows up. Cue vast quantities of ineffective gunfire, multitudes of explosions, and a fair dose of assorted bladed weapons.

Boyd Holbrook and Olivia Munn in The Predator. IMDb.com.

Other characters include stock biologist/scientist Dr. Casey Bracket (Olivia Munn), stock government super-secret program guy Traeger (Sterling K. Brown), and McKenna’s stock super-intelligent son Rory (Jacob Tremblay), who manages to figure out how to use the predator’s alien technology without much difficulty. Nobody turns in a particularly good performance, but that’s not entirely the actors’ faults. They’re not given characters to work with so much as standard archetypes. Continue reading →