It’s hard to imagine, back in 1987 when the first Predator film came out showcasing big Arnie’s rippling biceps, that anyone could have predicted it would spawn such a diverse array of sequel material. But here we are: 2025 brings us an animated anthology, with Predators tearing human kind a new one in Viking times, samurai-era Japan, and Florida during the second world war. This follows the excellent 2022 movie Prey and the mostly stupid Alien vs Predator from 2004, in which a lady makes friends with a Predator, which rather nullifies the scare factor.
Killer of Killers opens with the Viking chapter, The Shield, set in AD841. One of the film’s better ideas is the Vikings referring to the Predator as Grendel, a reference of course to the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, in which a humanoid monster walks in darkness and hunts the weak … sound familiar? Much Game of Thrones style Sturm und Drang follows, before the most powerful Viking is abducted by the Predators who are essentially doing casting for their version of a reality show.
This essentially sets the pattern for the rest of the film. Medieval Japan follows in The Sword, with some handy lessons about teamwork, and then it’s on to The Bullet, set in Florida in wartime, a section home to some of the better action sequences, with planes getting sliced into cubes in mid-air by Team Alien.
The only problem with this stuff is that you can’t help picturing how much more spectacular it would look in live action. The animation is all perfectly competent but it’s lacking a little something – that spark of life and ingenuity that can make even flawed animation so fascinating. There’s something quite slick about all this, almost to a fault. Was AI involved? We’ll probably never know, but it’s a problem that the suspicion has got inside the door.
Things pick up when we get to the Predators’ homeworld for the final showdown, with a Viking, samurai and US pilot set to fight to the death in an arena for the entertainment of the locals. There are some decent jokes and the basic issue of communication between the three is a nice note. It could have sparked a little more joy, perhaps, but it’s nice to see a franchise nearly 40 years old committed to constantly defying expectations.
• Predator: Killer of Killers is on Disney+ from 6 June
