Predator 2
Predator 2 (from Weird and Wonderful II: Fifty More Cult Films by George Hughes, available from freefall-productions.com on 02/11/20)
1990 / US / 108 minutes
“I didn’t think he was vegetarian…”
Director: Stephen Hopkins / Screenplay: Jim Thomas & John Thomas / Director of Photography: Peter Levy / Music: Alan Silvestri / Production: John Davis, Lawrence Gordon and Joel Silver for Twentieth Century Fox / Cast: Danny Glover (Mike Harrigan), Gary Busey (Peter Keyes), Ruben Blades (Danny Archuleta), Maria Conchita Alonso (Leona Cantrell), Bill Paxton (Jerry Lambert), Robert Davi (Phil Heinemann), Adam Baldwin (Garber), Morton Downey, Jr. (Tony Pope), Calvin Lockhart (King Willie), Henry Kingi (El Scorpio), Elpidia Carillo (Anna), Kevin Peter Hall (The Predator).
In 1987, John McTiernan’s Arnold Schwarzenegger- led Sci- Fi actioner Predator arrived the year after James Cameron’s Aliens and gave Twentieth Century Fox a second instantly iconic extraterrestrial monster to terrorise audiences with. Unlike the Alien though, the Predator operated on Earth in the present day. He could also quite handily be portrayed by a man in a suit so didn’t need a certain actor like Schwarzenegger’s own Terminator to portray him.
When it came time to do the inevitable sequel, the original’s writers Jim Thomas and John Thomas (two brothers who had knocked the first script out while working as lifeguards in California) were brought back on and developed a story about a different, younger Predator being sent on an “Initiation Hunt” in an urban environment rife with civilian targets. Because the first film established that the Predator will only attack armed prey, they set the sequel in the then near future of 1997 to ensure a violent enough arena to attract the alien hunter (although within just a couple of years it’s vision of a Los Angles torn apart would look like a very mild exaggeration indeed).
Unable to get McTiernan (who had become a hotter property after directing the first Die Hard and was committed to The Hunt for Red October) or Schwarzenegger (who disliked the urban setting, perhaps already planning his later political career in the state), the producers wisely realised that the Predator himself was now the focus and an (almost) entirely new cast of human characters would do to support this next hunt.
Beginning with fake out jungle noises and a swoop over some trees, Predator 2 then dives straight into it’s gang- ravaged, boiling hot city war zone without so much as an opening credit (something popularised by Robocop a couple of years earlier). This first action set piece works like a Bond pre- title sequence. A small but heavily armed squad of near future cops are in the middle of a shoot-out between the city’s two biggest drug gangs, identified only as the “Colombians” and the “Jamaicans”.
Jamaican gangs were predicted to be the next big thing in American crime at the time after a couple of pretty much isolated incidents had caught Hollywood’s attention and Steven Seagal’s Marked for Death (also 1990) used them too. But this opening sequence (with it’s fast, bloody, sweary, cocaine- fuelled casual brutality, pretty much turn of the ’90’s action films in a nutshell) focuses more on the Colombians, who retreat into a building they hold only to get taken out by a single, unseen attacker.
Detective Mike Harrigan (Danny Glover, relishing his turn to be the loose cannon maverick here after two Lethal Weapon films of playing straight man to Mad Mel) arrives just in time to see Colombian boss El Scorpio (veteran stuntman and bit part heavy Henry Kingi, who could give Al Leong a run for his money as of one of movie villains’ favourite henchmen) go off the roof, firing wildly at a seemingly invisible foe.
Harrigan and his vaguely defined unit of multi- ethnic cops (pretty adventurously for 1990, most of them are Hispanic and newcomer Bill Paxton is the token white guy who has to earn the others’ respect) at first suspect some kind of well- armed, martial arts master vigilante but it soon becomes clear that they’re dealing with something very different as more gang members are offed and a mysterious government agency headed by Peter Keyes (a brilliantly confrontational Gary Busey, playing what was supposed to have been Schwarzenegger’s character Dutch’s part in the story) take over the investigation.
Busey- who was in almost every big action movie going at the time (the first Lethal Weapon, Point Break, Under Siege) as both villains and just as shouty, aggressive antiheroes- eventually develops a grudging respect for Harrigan’s persistence in going after the Predator and tells him the story of the first film to explain what it is they’re up against (Elpidia Carillo is very briefly seen reprising her role from the original on one of Keyes’s monitors- the only other returning cast member is Kevin Peter Hall, who would tragically die of AIDS the next year, in the Predator suit).
Unfairly widely dismissed as a cynical knockoff at the time due to it’s completely different setting and characters, Predator 2 has only recently started to get the credit it deserves for making the monster itself the focus of the story as well as delving deeper into what this creature actually is and why he does what he does, expanding the ideas of the original whilst respecting and not contradicting any of them.
It’s also a great action film in it’s own right. The afore- mentioned opening is soon outdone by an even more over the top sequence that goes from gratuitous sex scene to gratuitous voodoo torture scene to gratuitous all-out massacre in a Blade Runner- esque futuristic apartment building (production designer Lawrence G. Paull was hired to pretty much recreate his Tyrell Corporation set). The subway attack is possibly the best thing in the whole film and the final act in which the Predator becomes the prey before ultimately revealing why he’s here is brilliantly done.
In fact, I think it’s fair to say that had this been the first Predator film, it would be the one that’s remembered and considered the classic (for a recent example of the same sort of thing, I’d say the same about the second season of True Detective- some people still just don’t get the idea of a continuation with a different cast). Of course, I love the first Predator but, for me, this one’s just so much more interesting on almost every level.
Predator 2 is faster, harder and certainly more gripping than the original because of all the potential collateral damage in the middle of a civilian population (the moment the Predator’s target zooms in on a child with a toy gun is more tense than anything in the first film). British director Stephen Hopkins never got much luck with the projects he was given afterwards until he made the move to TV in 2000 and did the bulk of 24’s first season, establishing the style the series ran with for the next decade.
The Predator himself ended up absent from cinema screens for the next fourteen years, despite Robert Rodriguez writing and offering to make an Aliens- inspired third film in which a crack team of human hunters would take on the Predators on their home planet in the late ’90’s. And when the Predator did come back he was second- billed in Paul W.S. Anderson’s very silly Alien Vs. Predator (Fox had combined it’s two biggest monsters years earlier for comic books and video games- there’s even a glimpse of an Alien skull amongst the trophies in Predator 2), which significantly toned down the horror element that had made both franchises.
In 2006, Freefall Productions made our first short fan film with Predator 3: On the Hunt and we attempted to continue the story of government agencies trying to capture a Predator whilst also incorporating some ideas from Rodriguez’s script. Only ever made to give our repertory company of actors something quick and easy to do in order to keep people with day jobs interested in coming back for the more serious projects, Predator 3 was a big hit online as it was released back when YouTube was still mostly user- generated content before the corporations moved in. Although technically only an extra, it was the main selling point for a compilation DVD of our shorts and seeing it crop up online again a few years later with Japanese subtitles added was a very proud moment!
2008 saw the release of Alien Vs. Predator: Requiem, a largely forgettable sequel to Anderson’s film that did do some interesting stuff in setting up ideas for a long- rumoured Alien prequel (that eventually became Ridley Scott’s Prometheus), including, most strikingly for me, an ending extremely similar to our Predator 3’s.
In 2010, Rodriguez’s story was reworked into Predators, a promising- looking but ultimately pretty average outing again focussing on professional soldiers taking on the alien hunters in a wilderness, only this time an extraterrestrial one. Most recently Shane Black (who was in the first film as an actor) made the lazily titled “The” Predator (also known as Predator: Evolution) in 2017, which disappointingly turned out to be a semi- comical take on the idea that never really works.
But it’s perhaps because of half-baked missed opportunities like Predators and The Predator that Predator 2 has been re- evaluated in recent years as the best continuation the original ever got. It’s “Twenty minutes into the future” setting obviously looks more like thirty years into the past now but it does get some things right- the character of Tony Pope and his “Hardcore Reports” predicts both irresponsible, tabloid- style fake news and crusading independent journalism in the face of an establishment cover-up at the same time.
Then there’s the top- notch cast: Robert Davi as Harrigan’s angry boss, Ruben Blades as his partner Danny (the only character to go through the film with anything resembling a cool head) and Maria Conchita Alonso as the squad’s Vasquez in Aliens- like tough girl who specialises in Spanish swearing (although the character doesn’t get much to do, she’s one of the few to survive when another Predator rule is revealed- he won’t kill an armed woman after seeing that she’s pregnant).
Finally, there’s the late, great Paxton doing what he does best and becoming the first and, so far only, actor to be killed off by a Terminator, an Alien and a Predator. There is some debate as to whether Lance Henriksen has equalled this record as Bishop asks to be deactivated after the not necessarily fatal damage done to him by the Alien Queen and because Henriksen wasn’t taken out by a Predator until Alien Vs. Predator, which doesn’t really count anyway. And although I reused most of my Predator 3 cast in our later Alien and Terminator fan films, no one managed the triple kill- off in them either.
1990 / US / 108 minutes
“I didn’t think he was vegetarian…”
Director: Stephen Hopkins / Screenplay: Jim Thomas & John Thomas / Director of Photography: Peter Levy / Music: Alan Silvestri / Production: John Davis, Lawrence Gordon and Joel Silver for Twentieth Century Fox / Cast: Danny Glover (Mike Harrigan), Gary Busey (Peter Keyes), Ruben Blades (Danny Archuleta), Maria Conchita Alonso (Leona Cantrell), Bill Paxton (Jerry Lambert), Robert Davi (Phil Heinemann), Adam Baldwin (Garber), Morton Downey, Jr. (Tony Pope), Calvin Lockhart (King Willie), Henry Kingi (El Scorpio), Elpidia Carillo (Anna), Kevin Peter Hall (The Predator).
In 1987, John McTiernan’s Arnold Schwarzenegger- led Sci- Fi actioner Predator arrived the year after James Cameron’s Aliens and gave Twentieth Century Fox a second instantly iconic extraterrestrial monster to terrorise audiences with. Unlike the Alien though, the Predator operated on Earth in the present day. He could also quite handily be portrayed by a man in a suit so didn’t need a certain actor like Schwarzenegger’s own Terminator to portray him.
When it came time to do the inevitable sequel, the original’s writers Jim Thomas and John Thomas (two brothers who had knocked the first script out while working as lifeguards in California) were brought back on and developed a story about a different, younger Predator being sent on an “Initiation Hunt” in an urban environment rife with civilian targets. Because the first film established that the Predator will only attack armed prey, they set the sequel in the then near future of 1997 to ensure a violent enough arena to attract the alien hunter (although within just a couple of years it’s vision of a Los Angles torn apart would look like a very mild exaggeration indeed).
Unable to get McTiernan (who had become a hotter property after directing the first Die Hard and was committed to The Hunt for Red October) or Schwarzenegger (who disliked the urban setting, perhaps already planning his later political career in the state), the producers wisely realised that the Predator himself was now the focus and an (almost) entirely new cast of human characters would do to support this next hunt.
Beginning with fake out jungle noises and a swoop over some trees, Predator 2 then dives straight into it’s gang- ravaged, boiling hot city war zone without so much as an opening credit (something popularised by Robocop a couple of years earlier). This first action set piece works like a Bond pre- title sequence. A small but heavily armed squad of near future cops are in the middle of a shoot-out between the city’s two biggest drug gangs, identified only as the “Colombians” and the “Jamaicans”.
Jamaican gangs were predicted to be the next big thing in American crime at the time after a couple of pretty much isolated incidents had caught Hollywood’s attention and Steven Seagal’s Marked for Death (also 1990) used them too. But this opening sequence (with it’s fast, bloody, sweary, cocaine- fuelled casual brutality, pretty much turn of the ’90’s action films in a nutshell) focuses more on the Colombians, who retreat into a building they hold only to get taken out by a single, unseen attacker.
Detective Mike Harrigan (Danny Glover, relishing his turn to be the loose cannon maverick here after two Lethal Weapon films of playing straight man to Mad Mel) arrives just in time to see Colombian boss El Scorpio (veteran stuntman and bit part heavy Henry Kingi, who could give Al Leong a run for his money as of one of movie villains’ favourite henchmen) go off the roof, firing wildly at a seemingly invisible foe.
Harrigan and his vaguely defined unit of multi- ethnic cops (pretty adventurously for 1990, most of them are Hispanic and newcomer Bill Paxton is the token white guy who has to earn the others’ respect) at first suspect some kind of well- armed, martial arts master vigilante but it soon becomes clear that they’re dealing with something very different as more gang members are offed and a mysterious government agency headed by Peter Keyes (a brilliantly confrontational Gary Busey, playing what was supposed to have been Schwarzenegger’s character Dutch’s part in the story) take over the investigation.
Busey- who was in almost every big action movie going at the time (the first Lethal Weapon, Point Break, Under Siege) as both villains and just as shouty, aggressive antiheroes- eventually develops a grudging respect for Harrigan’s persistence in going after the Predator and tells him the story of the first film to explain what it is they’re up against (Elpidia Carillo is very briefly seen reprising her role from the original on one of Keyes’s monitors- the only other returning cast member is Kevin Peter Hall, who would tragically die of AIDS the next year, in the Predator suit).
Unfairly widely dismissed as a cynical knockoff at the time due to it’s completely different setting and characters, Predator 2 has only recently started to get the credit it deserves for making the monster itself the focus of the story as well as delving deeper into what this creature actually is and why he does what he does, expanding the ideas of the original whilst respecting and not contradicting any of them.
It’s also a great action film in it’s own right. The afore- mentioned opening is soon outdone by an even more over the top sequence that goes from gratuitous sex scene to gratuitous voodoo torture scene to gratuitous all-out massacre in a Blade Runner- esque futuristic apartment building (production designer Lawrence G. Paull was hired to pretty much recreate his Tyrell Corporation set). The subway attack is possibly the best thing in the whole film and the final act in which the Predator becomes the prey before ultimately revealing why he’s here is brilliantly done.
In fact, I think it’s fair to say that had this been the first Predator film, it would be the one that’s remembered and considered the classic (for a recent example of the same sort of thing, I’d say the same about the second season of True Detective- some people still just don’t get the idea of a continuation with a different cast). Of course, I love the first Predator but, for me, this one’s just so much more interesting on almost every level.
Predator 2 is faster, harder and certainly more gripping than the original because of all the potential collateral damage in the middle of a civilian population (the moment the Predator’s target zooms in on a child with a toy gun is more tense than anything in the first film). British director Stephen Hopkins never got much luck with the projects he was given afterwards until he made the move to TV in 2000 and did the bulk of 24’s first season, establishing the style the series ran with for the next decade.
The Predator himself ended up absent from cinema screens for the next fourteen years, despite Robert Rodriguez writing and offering to make an Aliens- inspired third film in which a crack team of human hunters would take on the Predators on their home planet in the late ’90’s. And when the Predator did come back he was second- billed in Paul W.S. Anderson’s very silly Alien Vs. Predator (Fox had combined it’s two biggest monsters years earlier for comic books and video games- there’s even a glimpse of an Alien skull amongst the trophies in Predator 2), which significantly toned down the horror element that had made both franchises.
In 2006, Freefall Productions made our first short fan film with Predator 3: On the Hunt and we attempted to continue the story of government agencies trying to capture a Predator whilst also incorporating some ideas from Rodriguez’s script. Only ever made to give our repertory company of actors something quick and easy to do in order to keep people with day jobs interested in coming back for the more serious projects, Predator 3 was a big hit online as it was released back when YouTube was still mostly user- generated content before the corporations moved in. Although technically only an extra, it was the main selling point for a compilation DVD of our shorts and seeing it crop up online again a few years later with Japanese subtitles added was a very proud moment!
2008 saw the release of Alien Vs. Predator: Requiem, a largely forgettable sequel to Anderson’s film that did do some interesting stuff in setting up ideas for a long- rumoured Alien prequel (that eventually became Ridley Scott’s Prometheus), including, most strikingly for me, an ending extremely similar to our Predator 3’s.
In 2010, Rodriguez’s story was reworked into Predators, a promising- looking but ultimately pretty average outing again focussing on professional soldiers taking on the alien hunters in a wilderness, only this time an extraterrestrial one. Most recently Shane Black (who was in the first film as an actor) made the lazily titled “The” Predator (also known as Predator: Evolution) in 2017, which disappointingly turned out to be a semi- comical take on the idea that never really works.
But it’s perhaps because of half-baked missed opportunities like Predators and The Predator that Predator 2 has been re- evaluated in recent years as the best continuation the original ever got. It’s “Twenty minutes into the future” setting obviously looks more like thirty years into the past now but it does get some things right- the character of Tony Pope and his “Hardcore Reports” predicts both irresponsible, tabloid- style fake news and crusading independent journalism in the face of an establishment cover-up at the same time.
Then there’s the top- notch cast: Robert Davi as Harrigan’s angry boss, Ruben Blades as his partner Danny (the only character to go through the film with anything resembling a cool head) and Maria Conchita Alonso as the squad’s Vasquez in Aliens- like tough girl who specialises in Spanish swearing (although the character doesn’t get much to do, she’s one of the few to survive when another Predator rule is revealed- he won’t kill an armed woman after seeing that she’s pregnant).
Finally, there’s the late, great Paxton doing what he does best and becoming the first and, so far only, actor to be killed off by a Terminator, an Alien and a Predator. There is some debate as to whether Lance Henriksen has equalled this record as Bishop asks to be deactivated after the not necessarily fatal damage done to him by the Alien Queen and because Henriksen wasn’t taken out by a Predator until Alien Vs. Predator, which doesn’t really count anyway. And although I reused most of my Predator 3 cast in our later Alien and Terminator fan films, no one managed the triple kill- off in them either.
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