Dan Trachtenberg and Joshua Wassung’s Predator: Killer of Killers is just as quick and efficient as the Predators themselves, giving you just enough context around its human characters and how they end up in the monsters’ infrared sights. Specifically, the film tells three stories spanning centuries of hostile extraterrestrial sojourns by Predators—the Yautja, if you’re nasty—to our fragile blue world, thrillingly expanding the series universe.
The first story centers around Ursa (Lindsay Lavanchy), a Viking chieftain trekking halfway across the planet on a bloody revenge tour that catches the attention of a different type of warrior. The second focuses on Kenji (Louis Ozawa), a samurai whose fateful duel with his ninja brother, Kiyoshi (also voiced by Ozawa), gets some extraterrestrial interference. And the third concerns Torres (Rick Gonzalez), a Latino plane mechanic during World War II who takes to the skies when an Allied squadron meets the Yautja equivalent of the Red Baron.
Redolent of Captain Ahab’s journey in Moby Dick, for the way she steadily descends into madness the closer she gets to the revenge she wants, Ursa’s story is the most fully fleshed out of the bunch. The others certainly have their strengths—Kenji’s for its poetry, and Torres’s for spotlighting the valor of Hispanic Americans during WWII—but given its lean and mean 90-minutes, Killer of Killers only gives us just enough to get by, get invested, and get to the goods.
And the goods are pretty spectacular. Drawn with the same striking half-frame-rate style as the Spider-Verse films but with grounding in real-world action choreography, the wars these people wage are knock-down, drag-out, finesse-less brawls with not just a body count but deep, wince-worthy wounds that Killer of Killers never lets its audience forget about. Once the segments get into the weeds with pure combat, they’re incredible.
The fact that this animated anthology’s segments skate by with perfunctory setup wouldn’t necessarily be a problem; they’re presented like big, bloody campfire stories, and they work on that level. It’s just hard to square that with the twisty climax, where the film’s actual framework reveals itself—a fun, sci-fi idea that takes up the last 20 minutes and ties the tales together.
It’s hard not to wish, for one, that we had gotten to spend more time with Ursa and her son, or more of Kenji’s philosophical opposition to his brother, or a deeper sense of how Torres’s immigrant past feeds into his survival instincts. The climax is spent setting the stage for a bigger and more expansive story in this universe (whether or not that ties to Trachtenberg’s upcoming Predator: Badlands remains to be seen), when that runtime could’ve been better spent crafting even more intimate moments involving the characters. But that’s only a flaw inasmuch as Killer of Killer still manages to prove itself quite capable of doing both.
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