2025 | rated R | Animation | directed by Dan Trachtenberg and Joshua Wassung | 1 hr 25 mins | 4 1/2 out of 5 stars |
2025 Sequelfest # 3
3 years after director Dan Trachtenberg (10 Cloverfield Lane) jumpstarted the Predator franchise with the surprise hit Prey, he returns with a triple dose of Predator action. It’s a work clearly inspired by a true fan of the franchise and beautifully animated to bring to life the iconic monster in all its gory glory. It’s made all the more impressive by the fact that Predator: Killer of Killers is an anthology, a movie style famously inconsistent that makes me roll my eyes with exhaustion. Yet here, each new installment in this movie is a banger. Killers is all killer, no filler. Trachtenberg has again delivered adrenaline-fueled, imaginatively realized, tightly paced genre work.
Killer of Killers follows different breeds of Predator hunting on Earth across 3 different time periods. First we visit the frozen over world of Nordic Vikings in “The Shield”, a young boy and his fierce mother, who raid a village and find that raid interrupted by a Predator. Then we travel to imperial Japan where two brothers battle each other for power, a battle interrupted by an invisible alien foe in the nearly wordless “The Sword”. In the final chapter, “The Bullet” we fast forward to World War 2 where a young fighter pilot encounters a Predator spaceship who attacks his fleet.
The movie is gorgeously animated. It looks like, and borrows some of the team from, the Netflix masterpiece Arcane: League of Legends to bring these three stories to life. It gives the film a fluidity in the action and clarity in the single-shot sequences that a live action movie wouldn’t have. And despite, or more likely because, of that animated style, the violence and gore is cranked up to a 9. People get sliced, diced, squeezed, impaled and heads ripped from spines. Everything you’d expect to see in a Predator movie, including a few kills here so inventive, stylish or surprising that I reacted out loud to them. This movie is quick, efficient and brutal. A total joy.
The stories are also cleverly woven together. Each story involves some Earthly conflict the Predators are interfering in. War between tribes, war between family, war between nations. We see – by simple juxtaposition – the history of warfare from swords and shields to weapons of war that evolve into massive iron ships and long-range missiles. The film then does few anthologies do and tie it all together in a secret 4th act.
It struck me that this is exactly the kind of sequel to make for a movie like 1987’s Predator. A movie where most of the fun is witnessing the slow surprise reveal of what this thing in the jungle really is. It’s a quality that no other sequel can repeat, but Trachtenberg and co-director Joshua Wassung side-step this by essentially switching our POV from humans to that of the Predators as they drop into different Earth hunts in different periods, unsure of what they will find and what new technology and challenges await them. They don’t bother with a slow reveal and just get right into the action. It really works and while there is a lot of love out there for the urban jungle of the Danny Glover-led Predator 2, Killer of Killers is easily my favorite of the Predator sequels (and prequels) to date. This is a move clearly made out of affection for this franchise by fans – for fans – a rarity these days.
Speaking of rare, Predator: Killer of Killers debuted on Hulu in the weekend between theaters getting a live action remake of Lilo and Stitch and a live-action remake of How to Train Your Dragon. Despite this trend to plaster over animation with their live-action remakes, the craftsmanship of this movie, the result so fun, clever and inventive, is a testament that the trend is entirely creatively backwards. This is how to do it. Predator: Killer of Killers’ approach electrifies this franchise, and we should be getting more animated adaptations of live-action movies, not the reverse.