Predator: Badlands (2025) - 6/10

I did a deep dive on Predator films earlier this year (2025). It’s a mixed bag, but sees the franchise generally improving. It’s with some hope then that I enter Badlands. This is certainly different. We meet Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi) a young vengeful Predator out to prove himself and earn a place in his families clan, by killing a Kalisk, a creature thought to be indestructible. It’s a troubling start frankly. CGI Predators with clunky dialogue, yep dialogue! The Predator is no longer the bad guy, Dek is our hero. Finding himself on a naturally booby trapped hostile planet with Thia (Elle Fanning). She’s a synthetic robot from the Alien franchise, now seemingly forever fused with Predator after the ill-advised AvP films. Thia has seen the Kalisk and offers to help Dek, but Thia isn’t the only synth on the planet, she has an evil twin, Tessa (also Fanning). The pair had of course been on a bioweapon mission. Add in a cute little armoured monkey and the unsociable Dek has himself some friends. It’s heavy on action, monsters and CGI. Much too much of the latter and really it’s only a Predator film by virtue of the creatures design. It’s a simple revenge movie, a thin one, bolstered only by knowledge of the two franchises, the histories of both on which it leans heavily. Big smashy revenge action movie though, on this footing, it works well. It’s also clearly not taking itself too seriously and this buys itself enough credit to make it engaging enough to be enjoyable. If you wanted a gritty grimy action movie with machine guns and pithy one liners like the original, just go watch that. It still stands up. This is something new. Certainly not iconic, but not as bad as some reviewers will have you believe. It feels like a spin off. Like The Mandalorian. Whether it has enough fuel in the tank to spawn more movies, on the strength of this, I’d say no, but that’s never stopped Predators before.

6/10