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Predator, The (3D)

7/10

Stars: Boyd Holbrook, Olivia Munn, Jacob Tremblay, Nebraska Williams, Keegan-Michael Key, Thomas Jane, Alfie Allen, Jake Busey, Augusto Aguilera, Yvonne Strahovski, Sterling K Brown, Brian Prince

Director: Shane Black

Cross The Magnificent Seven and The Dirty Dozen with comedy, science-fiction and continuous violent action, and you get The Predator - a riff on the old Schwarzenegger opus - which, however ludicrous, is very much its own movie. It even has an alien hellhound that seems to change sides half-way through.

McKenna (Holbrook, who seems to be playing it for laughs almost throughout) is an army sniper on a drug-busting assignment who finds himself in the wrong place at the swing time when an alien spacecraft lands, dispatching McKenna's two colleagues and disgorging a familiar, fang-busting Predator (Prince), this one bent in tracking person or persons unknown.

There's an improbably glamorous biologist (Munn), who equally improbably turns into a hard-cursing, uzi-wielding action girl when the captured Predator escapes, leaving mayhem in its wake.

Meanwhile, McKenna, en route to the lobotomy farm (don't ask), with a handful of one-plank-short military 'criminals' and misfits, soon becomes involved in the battle, especially as he has sent his young physics-genius son (Tremblay, the kid from Room) the Predator's hi-tech armguard, which leads the now-you-see-him galactic gnasher to home in on the boy.

Body parts, not to mention alien fluid, soon fly in all directions, interspersed with consistently ridiculous dialogue. And, in the last reel, we finally get some proper Predator action.

Director Shane Black, who wrote the Lethal Weapon films and directed Iron Man 3 and The Nice Guys, ensures that the pace never drops; and the film, for all its idiocies, is undeniably good fun from first frame to last, with effective use of the much-maligned 3D system.

David Quinlan

USA 2018. UK Distributor: 20th Century Fox. Colour by FotoKem.
108 minutes. Widescreen. UK certificate: 15.

Guidance ratings (out of 3): Sex/nudity 0, Violence/Horror 3, Drugs 0, Swearing 3.

Review date: 12 Sep 2018