Predator 2
The original 1987 Predator remains in many ways an untouchable sci fi / action masterpiece, theoretically impossible to top by almost any standards imaginable with one Arnold Schwarzenegger (in his prime) being horrified watching his brothers in arms getting cut down one by one before donning his warpaint and squaring off with the highly advanced and evolved alien hunter responsible for their gruesome deaths. A sequel was inevitable and probably necessary, coming out in 1990 (although set in 1997 which was 10 years after the events of the original) and smartly changing up the locale from a remote jungle setting to that of a big city urban environment, although director Stephen Hopkins caused a bit of a stir when he changed the originally selected location of New York City to LA even after some fairly extensive preproduction work had been done with the New York setting, presumably to keep the budget lower. Even Arnold was approached by the producers to reprise his role now rigidly tracking the creature through the big city, but money issues and / or his commitment to making T2 for James Cameron caused that to fall through. Instead, for our lead character of a badass LAPD cop who plays by his own rules, we would get Danny Glover (who certainly couldn’t have been the first choice) and one of the biggest surprises here is in just how well Glover manages to pull off this longstanding action movie archetype especially after playing sidekick to Mel Gibson’s badass LAPD rebel Martin Riggs in the Lethal Weapon franchise. The film even goes so far as to have the duo’s beleaguered police captain (Steve Kahan) from that franchise show up briefly here as a SWAT team commander working with Glover and his men, a sight that might certainly cause some viewers to do a double take. The movie opens with the scenario that downtown LA is now an utterly uncontrollable war zone, with rival drug gangs engaging in open warfare on the streets with both themselves and the LAPD, a perfect situation for a legitimate hunter species like The Predator (Kevin Peter Hall returning) to come in and start cleaning up which is exactly what he does, albeit (from apparently monitoring the situation at hand) he makes it a point to target the drug dealers and gang members but NOT the cops, only killing law enforcement when they either engage directly with him in combat or trespass / get too close to his point of origin. The creature though HAS noticed Glover (said to have the best felony arrest record in the history of the department along with a long line of citations for misconduct) to be an exceptional badass in his own right, with Glover first seen rocketing an unmarked cop car directly into the line of fire to create a distraction so that he and his men can move in on a particularly nasty group of Columbians who are armed to the teeth. Too bad though, as The Predator intercepts the cops before they can close in on these bad guys, tearing up the Columbians en route to several high pitched screaming deaths. From there, it’s the Jamaican drug cartel’s turn, with more cadaver corpses as Glover starts to wonder just what in the hell is going on and it isn’t long before The Predator takes out his partner (Ruben Blades) for going in and trying to collect as many of the creature’s high tech weapons as he can. This sets off Glover on a revenge trip until he runs afoul of a military intelligence operative (thankfully identified as being such instead of the tired and overdone CIA gimmick) played by Gary Busey whom we find out had not only formally debriefed Arnold after the events of Part 1, but whose main mission is also to obtain the advanced weaponry to possibly replicate for our own military using reverse engineering. The problem lies with Busey’s idiotic plan in doing so, which is to freeze the creature so that it can be captured alive instead of simply just killing it and taking its weapons (does he really expect The Predator while in captivity to instruct them in how to use the devices?). That being said, this is an action film that hits the ground running from its first moments, with a blistering gunfight in broad daylight and continues on from there making the most of its LA locations along with a permeating atmosphere of dread and doom. It also has one hell of a cast on hand backing up Glover including Maria Conchita Alonso and Bill Paxton as his fellow cops, Robert Davi as the tyrannical police captain always chewing out his top cop, Adam “Animal Mother” Baldwin as Busey’s flunky, and strangest of all Morton Downey Jr. as a trash TV reporter who always seems to be starting trouble. Of course, the film’s most important contributions are those concerning the character development of The Predator creature itself, whom in the first film just seemed to be taking out Arnold’s crew in a remote locale simply because they happened to be there but here is ostensibly a good guy taking out criminals who nonetheless seems to want to challenge Glover to a showdown as a matter of honor, something he gets in spades in the last 20 minutes when the supercop takes him on head to head in what is as much a battle of wits as it is instinct, with an awe inspiring final scene and the notion that the Predators as a species are truly noble creatures of honor and respect even towards their most worthy of adversaries despite the quasi nuclear device they carry around with them, which is something they surely must use more to cover their own tracks rather than merely showing poor sportsmanship like the creature in Part 1 seemed to do to Arnold…
8/10