THE PREDATOR...

At its best, The Predator recalls some of the great sci-fi adventure films of the past.

At its worst, it's just a loud, clunky piece of modern filmmaking, loaded with dumb jokes, dizzying cliffhangers, and mile-high explosions.

This is the sixth entry of a series that began in 1987, and since none of the first five were memorable, this one had  a good chance to stand out. I'm not sure if it's better than the others, but it feels slick and potent; Twentieth Century Fox pounded it down our throats with advertising, so the company obviously hopes to reignite a franchise that never meant much in the first place.

What the series has in its favor is a cool looking monster, a strutting space warrior with a nasty attitude. Yes, his helmet looks like an inverted bedpan, but he's a  tough critter. Sadly, he has to share the screen with a lot of lame humans. 

Quinn McKenna (Boyd Holbrook) is a military assassin who encounters a predator during a  maneuver in Mexico. He's promptly sent to a psyche ward (but not before stripping a dead alien's armor off and mailing it home). On the bus to the clinic, he meets a bunch of lovable losers (known as "The Loonies") who will assist him in fending off another round of predators from space. Conveniently, all of the loonies had backgrounds as weapons experts and chopper pilots.

McKenna's son, however, (Jacob Tremblay) inadvertently receives the predator's armor in the mail and turns it into an ersatz Halloween costume. He's a shy little kid, not only autistic but also a genius on many levels. He's the proverbial magic child often found in these movies, and you just know he'll figure deeply in the story.

Soon, another predator is on our planet searching for the first one. Not only is he bigger,  meaner, and uglier than previous predators, but he brought a couple of "space dogs" with him. They look like giant bull mastiffs if designed by H.R. Giger. 

Eventually, the movie is awash with predators, snipers, space dogs, loonies, scientists, and two-faced government agents. The action is bloody, and blindingly fast, but lacks wit and imagination. Men are sliced in half as casually as being punched in the face.

Midway through The Predator  we realize all of the characters have been introduced, the plot has been laid out, and that it's not going to get any better. Your choice is to either walk out, or hang in there and enjoy the noise and spectacle. Maybe you'll like Tom Jane as the loony with Tourettes; he twitches and says a lot of dirty words.

Or you can wait for the Predator. He's not hidden away; he's in many scenes, and at one point he even speaks. It turns out he's collecting human DNA  because he wants to create some kind of predator-human hybrid. There's some babbling about the human race coming to an end because of global warming, but I can't imagine the predators being improved with our puny DNA in their systems.

All I can figure is writer/director Shane Black likes those alien conspiracy programs on the History channel. 

Black acted in the first Predator  31 years ago. He went on to write several successful screenplays, including the first two Lethal Weapon movies. He specializes in a kind of goofy action slapstick that doesn't really fit in a space adventure. It's like smearing relish on a banana split.

Oddly enough, the first half of the movie was surprisingly entertaining. There were visual nods to some great old movies of the 1950s - This Island Earth, Forbidden Planet, and even The Thing - that made me think The Predator might actually succeed. The space ships were lithe and menacing, the crash landings were exciting, and the cinematography by Larry Fong was pristine.Weapons glistened; intestines oozed; the space creatures were breathtaking.

Then it morphed into a generic modern movie where problems are resolved by kickboxing and blowing things up. Even Olivia Munn, who appears as a scientist, becomes an action hero of sorts, leaping around and brawling like Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible.

We can almost imagine the pitch meeting, with Black telling the Fox executives, "It will be like One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest meets Predator." The execs, after googling One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, gave him the green light, as long as the second half featured a lot of fireballs and exploding nonsense.