Predator: Killer of Killers (2025)

 

Predator: Killer of Killers (2025)

7/10

 

Starring the voices of

Lindsay LaVanchy

Louis Ozawa

Rick Gonzalez

Michael Biehn

 

 

Directed by Dan Trachtenberg

 

Spoiler alert

 

When you are watching and you see the first battle in 841 AD — when the Predator took on Ursa, a Scandinavian Viking warrioress who leads her clan on a revenge mission — you are amazed. The battle is raw, and even though the Predator seems to have the upper hand in size and gadgets, this woman was no pushover. And this animation starts as such, watching this woman survive and take on the Predator, only to lose everything else.

It is then you can see where this is going, which is not that much of a good thing, as the suspense is gone on who will win in the fights — you can see them all on the Predator ship. This animation is broken into segments, and you know the last segment will tie it all up.

What I like the most is the intensity and the violence, as the animation kind of answers the questions no one was actually asking — how will the Predator be when it takes on a ninja, or Viking, or as we saw in the movie Prey (2022), a Comanche?

The animation in this movie is like that of Arcane, and it flows well. The voice acting, writing, and directing are magnificent as the movie moves fast, with gore violence.

As I said above, the first segment is about Ursa and the Predator. The second segment takes place in Japan, 1609, about a ninja who takes on the Predator. The third segment is set in 1941, about a U.S. Navy gunman and the Predator. These three are then taken to the Predator planet, and as these are warrior races who take joy in the battles, there is a planned fight.

Now, like many of the Predator movies, this one did not handle the introduction well — that I score it low on. If you have no clue what this series is about, then you will be left trying to understand why the Predator is acting the way it does. The movie starts with a brief writing trying to shed light on how the Predator race sees things, but I had people with me not still getting it until I had to flesh it out.

In the end, Dan Trachtenberg did a good job in the writing and story — he was also behind the camera in Prey (2022), so he is not new to the franchise. I would have felt an animation would have given him more freedom to make a lot of things add up, but he did not jump on that and just ran with his idea instead of using this animation to flesh out the Predator race.

Nonetheless, the cinematic fights and flights are worth seeing, and I can easily say — go see this movie because of that. It is streaming on Disney+.