The Predator

The first time I saw Predator my parents were out for the evening and I was watching it in the basement family room with my two younger sisters.  We were so scared!  We thought there was an alien in our house so we barricaded ourselves downstairs until my parents got home.  To this day it remains one of the most frightening movies I've ever seen!  I've not seen any of the other movies in the franchise but my Dad has and he loves them.  When he heard about The Predator he asked me to take him to see it.  We've been planning this outing for at least a month and finally got to go last night.  The filmmakers took one of the scariest movies ever and turned it into an action/adventure thriller.  This is not necessarily a bad thing because my Dad and I had so much fun watching it (which was not what I was expecting at all).  Quinn McKenna (Boyd Holbrook), a covert operative, and all of his team are on a hostage retrieval mission when an alien ship crash lands.  His entire team is killed but McKenna is able to stun the predator and takes its helmet and armor as proof of what happened before the army comes in and takes charge.  Before he is captured and found incompetent, he mails the alien technology home where his son Rory (Jacob Tremblay) finds it and activates it.  Soon another alien ship comes to Earth to retrieve the stolen technology.  Hunting both predators are an evolutionary biologist (Olivia Munn), McKenna and a group of ragtag government prisoners (who contribute much comic relief), and some government agents.  Of course there is an epic showdown and the possibility of another sequel.  The story is a bit of a convoluted mess but it hardly matters.  I found Holbrook to be an appealing action hero and I really enjoyed the action sequences which were thrilling rather than scary.  The best sequences were when the entire team was hunting one of the predators in the woods (it reminded me of the first movie).  I thought the prisoners recruited by McKenna were funny (for the most part) but I eventually found the constant profanity and crude humor to be tiresome after a while.  It is entertaining and I had a lot of fun watching it with my Dad who called it an awesome B-movie.