Don’t you just hate it when the protagonist of your movie does action stuff while simultaneously having a vagina? It’s the worst thing since botulism. I actively felt my T-levels lowering while watching Prey, as if I was eating a sandwich made of estrogen and white guilt. I want my action films to be like the Bible: full of sweaty caricatures of men dropping epic one-liners and wreaking wanton destruction, preferably in an exotic environment. On a related note, did you know that Commando is actually an adaptation of an old Abrahamic folktale called “Hershel and the Haunted Dreidel”[1]?  

There’s not a haunted dreidel to be seen in Prey, which automatically drops its score by a point. Add in a competent, likeable female lead (the gall!), the protagonists’ immersion-shatteringly beautiful teeth, and several borderline-unrealistic uses of poultice-based medicine, and you’ve got the most disrespectful treatment of a beloved franchise since the “VeggieTales Rule 34” subreddit was founded.[2]

I’m kidding, of course.[3] Prey is pretty damn good – in my estimation, it’s the best entry in the series since Predator 2 – and I recommend you give it a watch. I’ll try to avoid major spoilers in this review (for once).

If It Bleeds…

The story follows Naru, an aspiring Comanche hunter living on the Great Plains in 1719. In order to for the tribe to officially accept her into the role of hunter, she has to successfully kill “something that’s hunting her,” a trial all members of the hunting group (led by her skeptical-yet-supportive older brother) must undergo. After a nearly-successful attempt at taking out a mountain lion almost gets her killed, Naru’s week only gets worse: her dog gets injured by an era-appropriate metal leg trap (uh-oh), and she narrowly avoids being mauled by a bear by hiding inside a beaver dam. While she’s hiding inside the dam, the Predator shows up and punches the bear to death; Naru takes off downstream, where she runs into a party of hunters from her own tribe, who report that her older brother sent them to search for her. With that, the table’s all set: the Predator is on the hunt, Naru is trying to explain the extraterrestrial threat to her companions, and, all the while, we know a mysterious third party is running around planting beartraps in the woods (which is really never a good thing).

The core of the movie’s structure is similar to the original’s, with an initial terrestrial threat – here, the bear; in the original, the rebels Arnold asked to “stick around” – replaced by a vicious, out-of-this-world opponent who whittles down the group of protagonists in brutal fashion. This is not a bad thing! The original Predator is a classic for a reason, and Prey does enough to distinguish itself – in both setting and plotting – to feel like a respectful reinterpretation instead of a dull retread.

The movie’s got gore, too. Buckets of it are splattered across Prey’s 100-minute runtime in creative ways that’ll make you wince and chuckle simultaneously. The Predator is presented using some fun effects, with its optical camouflage taking increased amounts of damage until the creature finally reveals itself. The CGI used on both the Predator and other, more earthly creatures, is great at best and serviceable at worst (impressive, given the movie’s straight-to-Hulu budget). This is not to mention the stellar performance of the dog playing Sarii, Naru’s canine companion. Sarii is a very good dog.

As for the human characters, Naru makes for a sympathetic protagonist, relying on her own grit and ingenuity to conquer challenges ranging from surviving a bear attack to tricking the Predator’s heat vision. The slim supporting cast (particularly Naru’s brother Taabe) is well-used, although the French trappers end up being pretty one-dimensional fodder for the Predator to slaughter its way through. The plot is smartly limited to a small-scale story about the intersection of Naru’s and the Predator’s hunts, and ends in (mostly) satisfying fashion. There are some fun easter eggs to pick out, as well (I’ll get into those below). The scope of the story and similar plot beats to the original film might rub some viewers the wrong way, but I quite enjoyed Prey as a whole, and I expect that even people who haven’t seen the franchise’s other instalments (for shame!) will have a good time with it.  

Spoilers Ahoy:

…I couldn’t resist.

• The villainous French trappers all look like homeless mall Santas with a fondness for flintlock weaponry. I knew that they’d show up at some point, given the, you know, bear traps, but I didn’t expect them to look so fucking grody.

• By the time we get to Naru’s final showdown with the monster, I feel like her name should be changed to Chris Hansen, given the way she’s embarrassing a Predator on television: it just can’t help but walk into obvious traps. I credit the fact to my assumption that this film’s Predator is a younger, less experienced hunter than those that appeared in, say, the first or second movies. This might also explain the level of technology it uses: there’s not shoulder-mounted plasma cannon to be seen here. Having a Predator that hunts in a more aggressive, straightforward manner is an interesting twist on the series’ formula, although I think it’d be best for the next film in the franchise to return to the calculating style of its previous antagonists – there’s only so much you can do with a Predator that doesn’t really fuck with concepts like ‘planning’ or ‘subtlety.’

• I hope someone makes a compilation of every time the Predator gets injured (set to the Benny Hill music). Just off the top of my head, the poor Predator suffers through a wolf bite, a partial bear mauling, an arrow to the arm, a spear through the foot, a gunshot to the back, a spear through the chest, three more arrows to the back and sides, getting stabbed in the hip, a bear trap to the ankle, a pistol shot to the back of the head, nearly drowning in a mud pit, a tomahawk in the chest, having its arm chopped off, getting its tooth ripped out and stabbed into its own eye, and then getting shot in the head again. What I’m saying is, the Predator gets absolutely fucked up in this movie.

• Prey has a few easter eggs that are pretty easy to spot but fun nonetheless. “If it bleeds, we can kill it,” is a classic line that’s always a crowd-pleaser. The main link to previous Predator films, though, was Raphael Adolini’s flintlock pistol, previously presented to Danny Glover’s Mike Harrigan at the end of Predator 2. Harrigan receives the pistol from a group of Predators as a trophy for his victory over of one of their own kind (the film’s main antagonist, whose body they have come to retrieve). Naturally, this begs the question of how the Predators got the pistol, given that it’s in Naru’s possession at the end of Prey. There’s a bit at the end of the credits that shows a drawing of Predator ships arriving over the Comanche village, but that feels…unsatisfying. There are less clumsy ways the movie could have worked in the Adolini pistol: for example, the Predator could have taken the pistol as a trophy from one of the trappers before being killed by Naru. She could have left the gun behind on the Predator’s body, and the movie could have ended with a quick scene of several other, older Predators arriving and taking the body, along with the pistol.

*End Spoilers*

If you’re looking for a bloody, fast-paced good time, you could do a lot worse than Prey. I’m not usually impressed by Hulu’s output, but this was a pleasant surprise.

Score: 8.25/10 (+.5/-1.25)

Bonus Section: In Contrast…

A friend and I fired up Predators almost immediately after finishing Prey, and were laughing our asses all the way off the couch before the full cast had even been introduced. Let’s run it down: We’ve got:

-Adrien Brody as a gruff, no-nonsense special forces type

-An Israel Defense Forces sniper with a very fancy gun

-A cartel enforcer played by Danny Trejo whose entire backstory is “I was in Baja before this”

-A member of a death squad from Sierra Leone (who says protagonists have to be easy to root for?)

-A Yakuza (who, of course, ends up fighting a predator with a samurai sword in a field of gently-swaying wheat)

-A Russian guy named Nikolai who’s carrying around a minigun like he’s Jesse Ventura in a better movie

-Walton Goggins[4] as a super racist prison inmate

and

-Topher Grace

(Laurence Fishburne shows up later, too.)

There’s clearly an odd man out here: Adrien Brody. I just think it’s a little immersion-breaking that his character from The Pianist would have such bad luck, you know?[5] Beyond that, Predators is a lean movie, without many subplots to speak of, but it somehow manages to be mildly disengaging. Maybe the cast was too big, maybe the script was too sparse, but I just couldn’t bring myself to give a single microscopic shit about what happened to any of the characters not portrayed by Topher Grace. If you’ve seen the movie, you’ll know that this journey ended in tears. Basically, Predators is a fine film to watch, if you’re drunk and also doing something else while it’s on.

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[1] Shoutout to the book Hershel and the Hannukah Goblins. That story’s dope. Great art, too.

[2] The date was November 12^th, 2014, for the record.

[3] I’m an asshole, but I’m not that kind of asshole.

[4] Walton Goggins: say it with me. Walton. Goggins. Uttering the guy’s name makes you feel so powerful.

[5] Still, it makes for a hell of a crossover event.