Predator: Badlands is a perfectly servicable movie that has the capacity to be better. At times, it almost feels like a pilot episode for a series instead of a feature film meant to stand on its own. It's never bad nor boring, but it's rarely exciting enough to stand out.
This is the ninth addition to the Predator franchise and the sixth live-action film. If you counted the comics, books, and games, that number would be way higher. At this point, comparing Predator: Badlands to the original Predator directed by John McTiernan would be foolish. While a classic, the 1980s thriller is decidedly the odd film out in a series that has ballooned into a vast mythology of its own.
Badlands is an even weirder proposition though. It's billed as a traditional summer blockbuster (releasing in November), but it plays more like a buddy comedy and coming of age story that happens to include androids.
Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi) is the scrawny outcast whose father wants him dead. To prove himself, Dek sets out on a hunt on a remote planet to kill a legendary beast no other hunter has beat.
On the road, he meets Thia (Elle Fanning), a chatty android sent by the Weyland-Yutani Corporation. Her twin sister, Tessa (also Fanning), also seeks the legendary creature. It's not long before the trio end up on a collision course with predictable, but fairly entertaining results.
The plot is not complex, but it is convoluted. Why, for example, would a mammoth corporation create highly specific android models capable of compassion for the sole purpose of capturing wildlife? The film makes it explicitly clear that of the two, it is the cold and calculating Tessa who is the far more efficient hunter. By contrast, Thia's childlike behavior feels wildly out of place.
And yet I didn't question any of it while watching the film. Elle Fanning is such a magnetic performer and so good in her dual role that such absurdities didn't matter. It was only the instant the film ended that logic and reason barged in to ruin the party. Every time she's on screen, all the problems melt away. If there ever was a successor to Sigourney Weaver in this franchise, let it be Elle Fanning.
That's where Badlands exists as a film. It has tremendous drive and enjoyable setpieces and it keeps things just lively enough that you won't notice how messy it is until the end. In a way, that's a success of its own, and director Dan Trachtenberg certainly knows how to balance out comedy and action without overpowering either one.
It's also fun to see this kind of lighter side to the Predator mythos. While it isn't the first time we've had one of the titular creatures as a hero, they've rarely been this kind of an underdog. Dek is by no means a pushover, but it takes a while for him to become the badass killing machine most would expect.
That's a major part of what makes Badlands so enjoyable. It has a videogame type of logic in its structure, teaching our hero the threats and traits of each "level" for the first half before going hog wild in the second one. Granted, it's not particularly graceful nor eloquent, and the characters are so thinly drawn calling them two dimensional is an insult to dimensions. But there is an artistry in putting even flimsy elements together.
Badlands begins and ends like it's sliced off from something larger. It has the looseness of a streaming series that feels off on the big screen. The murky and underlit cinematography doesn't help one bit. At times, it's almost impossible to tell what's happening on screen. How it looks so much worse than Prey, also made by the same team, I will never understand.
Despite all this, if you have free tickets and a Friday evening without plans, you could do a lot worse than seeing Predator: Badlands. That sounds like faint praise, but it really isn't. These days it takes a lot for folks to go into theaters. If you want something that provides ample entertainment for the buck, Trachtenberg's latest is a breezy and fun way to spend a few hours. It won't challenge you, but it does deliver where it matters.
