Directed by Stephen Hopkins
Starring Danny Glover, Gary Busey, Ruben Blades, Maria Conchita Alonso, Bill Paxton and Robert Davi
Ladies and gentlemen, Predator 2, a.k.a. Hot Town, Predator in the City. I promise that this is the most cringe-worthy thing you'll read in this review.
Upon first watching the original flick way back when I was 13, I immediately wanted more of this world. I was well aware that there was a sequel, as this film popped up ALL THE TIME on TBS back in the day. For mysterious reasons, it popped up even more than the original. Maybe the rights were just cheaper? Who knows. These are the mysteries of the life of Jon Lickness. At any rate, back then, this film was just what I was looking for. The whole Predator creature was just endlessly fascinating and awesome to me, and this movie really expanded on what the thing was all about. It definitely didn't shy away from the violence. It gave us a few answers as to just how the Predators operate. In addition to all of that, the film had that whole glorious "overblown in the good way" action movie thing going on for it that movies these days don't even try to replicate for fear of becoming parodies of themselves. Think Sly's Cobra with an alien suit and you've got this movie.
Of course, not all of it was good. In retrospect, this movie does have its fair share of flaws. First among them is that while the flick does have a really good crop of actors, the characters are nowhere near as cool and badass as they were the first time around. As opposed to any of the characters rom the original film, now we've got Danny Glover in full-on action hero mode. He does his best, but he's no Arnold. The script (by brothers Jim and John Thomas, the guys who created the Predator in the first place) made the move of not just setting the carnage in the city, but in the FUTURE city. More specifically, the future city of 1997 Los Angeles circa 1990, where various drug gangs engage in open warfare with police officers and sniff cocaine in the middle of said wars. Yep, it actually happens. And that's what this movie is all about. Let's get to it.
I've mentioned on countless occasions that movies of this type typically waste no time getting going, but this one REALLY doesn't. We're immediately shot into a bloody shootout between a gang of Colombian drug lords and the LAPD, a party that soon gets crashed by Lieutenant Harrigan (Glover). He's your typical old-school cop movie dude who doesn't go by the rules. Within ten minutes of the title screen, we've seen a new Predator descend on the Colombians, massacre the f**k out of them, and a cop who has conversations with his captain about how much of an insubordinate he is. In short, it's an early '90s action movie masterpiece.
First things first, while the characters are pretty one-dimensional, all of the actors here are amazing and give this material their all. There's Danny Archuleto, Harrigan's best friend played by Ruben Blades and the first one to bite the dust. Spoiler alert. Then there's Leona Cantrell, the feisty Latina played by that all-time great feisty Latina Maria Conchita Alonso. I've always loved this woman; if I still did the skeevy paragraph, it would be coming up right about now. Yeah. Check out that workout scene from The Running Man for proof. And THEN there's the new guy Jerry Lambert, a.k.a. Bill Paxton in full Bill Paxton zany douchebag glory giving us periodic bad jokes and completing his hat trick as he becomes the only actor to get killed by a Terminator, an Alien, and a Predator onscreen.
Now, a few words about the execution of Predator 2. This flick was expected to be a big deal, and it was given a big-league budget of $35 million (gargantuan by 1990 standards). I suspect that this budget made the screenwriters go a little overboard with how many big set-pieces they wrote into this thing, as we aren't given a story so much as a long series of attacks by the Predator on the cops, the Colombians, and a particularly nasty gang of Jamaicans led by the vicious King Willie (Calvin Lockhart in a dynamite brief role). These attack scenes are frequent, bloody and violent, and I learned from the ever-accurate Wikipedia that this flick was originally given an NC-17 rating in its original version. I can see why. This is the only movie I've ever seen that contains a blood-soaked voodoo ritual being performed while a fully nude woman screams in the background before a violence-crazed alien descends onto the room and guts everyone inside in full cinematic glory. This is some damn movie. As an added bonus, the creature has a REALLY cool group of new weapons to dispense of his foes with. In the first, he just had that shoulder-cannon thing and his bare hands. This time around, he's got a net launcher that bores into the skin of anyone that it snares. This is some damn movie.
As if all the actors I've mentioned already aren't enough, this movie also has Gary Busey. This character is the one that brings us to where we need to go, as he's a Fed who claims he's in town to stop King Willie. As a surprise to no one, he's really after the Predator itself, much like Evilco (TM) was always after the Alien in the rival franchise. Of course, this puts him at odds with Harrigan. I know I haven't mentioned him much in this review, and it's a testament to how scatter-brained this particular flick was, but Glover really did give the thing his all. By the time most of his partners have been killed and he's on the trail of revenge, you're on his side. It all leads to a big showdown that starts with a sting operation being led by Busey in a slaughterhouse and winds up in the Predator's escape ship. Along the way, we see several of the society's rules in effect, such as not gunning down unarmed victims, sparing the life of a pregnant woman, and the somewhat cowardly practice of committing suicide when cornered. Every one of these discoveries was insane to me when I was younger, because I had so many friends and things to do.
If you can't tell, this movie is just structurally very different from the first. That one had a very sound screenplay and a slow-burn build. This movie, on the other hand, is choppy to the max. It tends to leap from violent horror sequences to violent action sequences with not really much in between. Of course, that's forgivable when you've got people getting cut up in as crazy-cool ways as this movie has, but watching this film isn't quite the tension-packed experience that the first was. A movie with this much murder and mayhem really was the perfect vehicle for Stephen Hopkins, the director of A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child. Hopkins is all about bleakness, and this movie was his shot at the title, as the L.A. of this movie is dark, twisted and bleak to the core. Obviously, it didn't quite pan out. This movie barely grossed half as much as the first while costing more, and while Hopkins has had a good career directing television he never quite became the next big thing that he was slated to be.
I loved this movie as a kid. Don't get me wrong - I still enjoy Predator 2. But I got one big thing out of re-watching it in preparation for this review. I can't help but think that this movie would have been a lot more effective had they dropped the whole "set a few years in the future/massive scale drug war" thing and just decided to have the story take place in modern-day 1990 Los Angeles without all of the exaggeration. How about this idea - a serial murderer is on the loose, and the Predator sees this sicko while gutting a few unfortunate souls in one of the seemier parts of the city. The cop character could be one of the homicide officers after the serial killer, only to find the ULTIMATE killer in the process. Tension-wise, this could have led to some very interesting situations as well as one BIG-TIME crowd pleasing death when the Predator catches the human bad guy. It also could have allowed the movie a lot more time to develop the characters as something other than one-note archetypes. I don't know, that's just me. Throw in a nude scene for Alonso and more of Paxton being a douche and I'd likely just be happy with that.
Judgment time. This flick is nowhere near the almost-perfect classic that the first movie is. But all these years later, the flick is still loads of fun. Thus, I award this movie *** out of ****. If you love Predator like I do, this one gives you more of what you want and then some.
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