Summary
Predator: Killer of Killers provides three excitingly visceral standalone Predator stories, and then risks upsetting the applecart by attempting to tie them all together.
What to do with the Predators? This has been a question of some concern for years now, ever since the all-time-great Arnold Schwarzenegger original provided a monster design so immediately iconic it had to be reused but so deliberately inscrutable that nobody quite knew what to do with it. Dan Trachtenberg has some ideas, though, several of which are explored in Killer of Killers, an animated semi-anthology and quasi-sequel to his excellent 1700s-set Prey, which will also function as a kind of table-setting exercise for the upcoming Badlands.
The franchise’s mythology is knotty at the best of times. The original idea was just to dump a Yautja – or several – into a specific setting and time period and have it terrorise people that had nothing to do with it, a rubric popularised by Predator (1987) and Predator 2 (1990) and returned to in Prey (2022). It was in the intervening period when things got a little weird. Predators (2010) bunched a group of characters together for the specific purpose of being bait – it was already established by this point that the Yautja were a spacefaring hunter species that take on increasingly dangerous prey for sport – and The Predator (2018), which is generally despised, made the misstep of trying to give the Yautja some kind of end goal for humanity specifically. There were also two crossovers with the Alien franchise, Alien vs. Predator (2004), which I quite like, and Alien vs. Predator: Requiem (2007), which is execrable garbage. And this cross-franchise association doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, since the character Elle Fanning is playing in Badlands is a Weyland-Yutani android.
You can see the problem, which is perhaps why with Killer of Killers, Trachtenberg tries to have his cake and eat it, using the freedom of animation to tell three stories that follow the classic template but also come together by the end in a way that seeks to expand the universe organically, without losing the core appeal. And it’s pretty successful in both regards, though I must confess to preferring the stand-alone stories. Though that’s just me.
First up, we visit 841 A.D. for “The Shield”, the story of a Viking warrior named Ursa (Lindsay LaVanchy) trying to make her son a man by leading him on a mission to avenge the death of his grandfather. Then we visit feudal Japan for “The Sword”, which finds two twin brothers, Kenji and Kyoshi (Louis Ozawa, Jack Ryan, Hunters), battling over their inheritance. And finally, “The Bullet” heads to 1942, where a mechanic named Torres (Rick Gonzalez) has aspirations of being a pilot but finds his ambitions tested in an aerial dogfight that takes an alien turn.
A still from Predator: Killer of Killers | Image via Hulu
And that’s the point. While all of these individual stories work on their own terms, they’re each complicated by the sudden arrival of a Yautja, which really puts their survival instincts to the test. And this is where Killer of Killers most excels, because it has a childlike conceptual enthusiasm for the idea of saying, simply, “What if Vikings/ninjas/fighter pilots, but there’s a Predator for some reason?”. It gets right to the very core of what’s fun about this franchise in the first place.
When the movie then tries to tie these seemingly separate stories together, things fall apart a bit, because there are a lot of head-scratching, unexplained logistics required to make the cohesion possible, and they’re never properly explained. The third act has a whiff of Predators about it, rendered a bit sillier by the idea that the language barrier is the only thing separating these three completely different characters from distinct cultures and radically different points in history. There’s a lot of fun action and visual flourishes in this stretch, but I wasn’t really buying it.
Everything in Predator: Killer of Killers looks great, to be fair. The animation is pretty consistent across all of the viewpoints, making me long for a Star Wars: Visions style anthology that allows for all kinds of different styles and stories, but it’s really richly drawn and crisply animated either way. This medium clearly allows for a degree of scale and experimentalism that suits the franchise well, even if it seems like nobody, even Trachtenberg, has any clue about how to expand the idea of the Predators beyond “intergalactic trophy hunters”, since that’s what it always boils down to in the end.
Maybe Badlands will scratch that itch. Killer of Killers is a different proposition, more of a proof of concept for a style of storytelling that gets the best of both worlds by delivering intriguing isolated stories while also fleshing out the wider worldbuilding. It seems like a slam-dunk to reinvent Predator as an excuse to visit interesting ancient cultures and build action-adventure movies into them, while letting the mythology develop in the background as a secondary concern. I just hope Trachtenberg keeps the balance right and resists the urge displayed here to knit everything together too tightly.
