The toothy villain is humanised and made sympathetic in this disappointing horror sci-fi – at which point it ceases to be the Predator
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here is disappointment in store for those hoping the Terrence Malick classic Badlands had been rebooted as a horror sci-fi, with Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek menaced by a great big space alien with a peculiar mouth. No: this is actually the umpteenth iteration of the Predator franchise, which has a roach-like unkillability itself, having started in 1987 with Arnold Schwarzenegger facing an extraterrestrial creature rustling and snarling in the Central American jungle.
Predator: Badlands is just about kept from flatlining by Elle Fanning’s effortless charm, though it shows what happens when the Predator in question must, in the service of narrative development, be humanised and made sympathetic and vulnerable and … kinda … nice? What happens is that it ceases to be the Predator, so something or someone else has inevitably to fill the Predator role.
So now there is a youngling from the unsightly Predator tribe called Dek (played in heavy prosthetics by New Zealand actor Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi); a creature with those distinctively horrendous choppers with a sort of cluster of mandible claws on it. (A real horror film would also show us what his genitals look like.) Dek’s alleged softness and weakness mean that he is about to be killed by his stern Predator father, but he escapes to go on a mission to reclaim his predatorial honour by killing a far-off fearsome monster called the Kalisk, which even his father is supposedly afraid of.
