By Jorge Ignacio Castillo

Predator: Killer of Killers (USA, 2025. Dir: Dan Trachtenberg, Joshua Wassung): First thing you need to know before reading this review: I’m not the biggest Predator fan. I find the character one-dimensional and his ethos doesn’t resist analysis. Are you going to tell me in the world of Predator nobody does anything besides hunting? What happens if I’m a predator and I prefer, I don’t know, alien chess? Do I become prey? Also, who develops all that funky technology? It can’t be the meathead dwellers of this planet.

Yes, I’m fully aware there’s an entire comic series that partially tackles these issues. No, I’m not going to read it as a movie should stand on its own merits and not in whatever backstory the villain may have.

If the Predator is a one-note antagonist, the burden of carrying the movie is on the humans. They’ve been up to the task only in the two first movies (the one with Schwarzenegger and the one with Danny Glover). The humans in The Predator, Predators, and Prey barely registered, and the least we say about the Alien vs Predator saga, the better.

Predator: Killer of Killers isn’t unbearable, but as in his previous foray in the franchise, director Dan Trachtenberg takes the titular character and himself way too seriously. This isn’t Shakespeare, no matter how many blood relatives you pit against each other.

The film is structured like an anthology, featuring three self-contained stories of warriors facing a predator in different periods of history: A Viking chieftain, two samurai siblings in feudal Japan, and an American pilot during WWII, all underdogs with nothing on the creature but their ingenuity.

There’s a fourth segment that brings everything together, which I would rather not spoil here. It’s arguably the weakest portion of the movie and shed undesired light onto the problems I mentioned previously. The Predator is frequently championed as a fair fighter. How fair can it be when he can turn invisible and use weapons generations ahead of ours?

The one element that makes Predator: Killer of Killers slightly more interesting than previous entries in the franchise is the animation. Elegant and merciless, the enhanced 2-D look elevates the been-there-done-that material. It nearly justifies watching the film. Nearly. ★★½☆☆

Predator: Killer of Killers is now playing in Disney Plus.