The Predator - Armored Assassin Predator by NECA - Toyark Photo Shoot

It's a great-looking figure from the worst Predator movie ever made, by far.

Nice photo shoot, Joe. I got a chuckle out of the shot with the decapitated Fugitive. What spine did you use for that? A Storm MK one?

It's a great shoot as always but I was actually on board with the movie until that dumbass thing showed up. Lost all interest after it killed off the Fugitive Predator.

Yeah. the one that came with Sub-Zero. Good catch!

I hear ya for sure. The movie didn't do anything for me. But I appreciate a well made figure.

That thing is a beast, friggin Play Arts Kai sizing there almost. Great shots.

I just watched the movie yesterday. I heard all the bad reviews and was prepared for the worst. When the predator was running amok in the lab, I thought, "Okay, it's not a great movie, but it's still kind of entertaining." It was all downhill after that. It was just so...stupid. Easily the worst in the series.

Anyway, the toys still look good. Considering how badly the movie bombed, I wonder how well they've been selling, though.

awesome photo shots
this is going to be a must get, also loving the box art.

Exactly. I went in with low expectations but I was digging the stuff with the Fugitive Predator until they killed him and the movie.

My sentiments exactly. Everything to do with the Fugitive Predator at the start was great, but the moment the big guy shows up, the whole thing goes downhill. Still it's a great figure, but I've no interest in getting something that only serves to remind me of how terrible the film was.

I think the toys are selling well enough, as Predator fans I think just like getting new quality figures to pick up regardless of the source material. I picked up a Fugitive Predator, and I thought the movie was garbage.

BTW, since we have some new viewers of this film here, I thought I'd keep the discussion going by re-posting a little "mini-review" I wrote on a different forum that points out all the stuff that's horrible about this movie. Anyone else, please feel free to chime in.

Here it is:

The Predator is just a whole new level of bad...it made the shitty AVP movies look like amazingly well-done and thoughtful films in comparison.

The plot was terrible, the script made almost no sense in parts, bad dialogue was in abundance, almost all of the characters were completely unlikable and annoying, and even the editing of the film was confusing and poorly done. It wasn't a bad Predator movie...it was a bad movie, period. Even the ending, which was completely reshot after test audiences shit all over it, was absolutely terrible.

I have some time to kill this morning, and its been a while since I've done a "random movie thoughts" post, so here's some examples:

• I love how in movies autism is treated like a superpower instead of a developmental disorder. Like, in The Predator the main character's kid is autistic, but it's just "movie autism." Meaning they have one scene in the beginning where he's established with a stereotypical reaction to a fire alarm (starts freaking out and tapping his head with both hands) but behaves like a completely normal kid for the rest of the movie. However, through the MAGIC OF AUTISM, he is able to completely decipher the Predator language and technology within seconds and by the end of the movie this child (he has to be like 10 years old) has a JOB WORKING FOR THE GOVERNMENT RESEARCHING PREDATOR TECH. I mean, with his own desk in a top-secret laboratory and everything.

• Even worse, Olivia Munn's scientist character makes a casual comment about how some scientists believe autistic individuals represent the next stage in human evolution(?!?), and it's later revealed that the Predators are taking the strongest genetic traits from the various species they hunt and adding them to their own DNA to become even stronger. And the Predator in this movie wants the kid so he can extract his autism and give it to himself. Like, seriously.

• And just more and more bad writing. The main character encounters the Predator in the beginning of the film and, to keep him quiet, the government ships him off to a mental hospital. He enters a bus with other vets who are heading to the aforementioned hospital and the head nutcase instantly takes a linking to him and immediately starts introducing each guy in the bus, one-by-one, by name and chief identifying personalty characteristic as if he's going down a checklist. "Here's so-and-so. He has Tourette Syndrome (guy then blurts out random curse word). Here's so-and-so, he's into Jesus (guy says something abut Jesus). Here's so-and-so, he tells jokes (guy tells joke)." And so it goes. It's the worst kind of forced expository dialogue.

Random stuff:

• People suddenly have vehicles or vitally important pieces of information without any establishing shots to show how or why they got them.

• The kid wears the Predator helmet while trick-or-treating - which 100% conceals his face - but the neighborhood bullies impossibly recognize him anyway. The kid then accidentally kills a bully with the mask.

• Tons of slopping editing. The kid makes friends with a dog and there's an odd shot of it running to the team's truck as if it's going to run inside and tag along. But the dog is never seen or mentioned again after that shot(?). Also, the main human bad guy is killed by accidentally blowing his own head off with a Predator plasma caster in a blink-and-you-missed-it shot that left people in the audience not even understanding what the fuck had happened.

• The Predator has alien dogs, but one gets shot in the head and as a result is suddenly tamed and starts playfully helping the humans like an Earth dog.

• The Predator ship takes off at the end with some humans clinging to it's surface. Olivia Munn's character is left behind. The ship flies for what seems like hundreds of miles before the humans bring it down. Olivia Munn amazingly manages to get to the ship's crash site ON FOOT WITHIN SECONDS to help in the final battle. Did the ship fly in a complete circle and crash where it took off?

• The cool-looking Predator in the trailers is killed before the middle of the film. Boo.

• The ending is just horrible. The 10 year-old autistic kid is working for the government now and is researching an object that the "good" Predator left behind for the humans (it's not even explained that the one Predator was "good" until the end...previously, he had been killing almost every human he encountered, so what makes him "good"?). The object is discovered essentially to be Iron Man's nano-suit from Infinity War, which the kid figures out is a "Predator Killer" suit for humans to wear. The suit looks ridiculous- it has dreadlocks and two massive cannons that pop out of nowhere from it's back like in a Looney Tunes cartoon. Just so dumb.

• No cool "Predator using his wacky advanced gadgets" scene. That stuff is pretty stripped down and marginalized, sadly.

That's just a small sampling of the dumb shit in this movie. I could go on all day with this, I won't. It sucks, I hope they don't make another one.

I think what pissed me off most was how they were trying to retcon everything from the previous movies. The Predators don't take spines to harvest DNA or some stupid BS it was about honoring worthy prey.

Exactly! That was some dumb shit.

@ Dolemite: Your write-up is bang on, especially re: the strange fascination with and misunderstanding of autism.

Everything is derivative, uninspired, debased. I was gobsmacked to read that Black considers this movie a "love letter" to the original, because it seems fundamentally disrespectful, even satirical. I honestly thought it was a parody. The deep questions and existential themes and inner drama that made the original great are glaringly absent. The most important subplot for Dutch didn't involve the Predator at all: I would describe it as his wrestling with self-doubt and ability to rise to a challenge and find his place in a universe beyond his control. You don't pay tribute to 'hard' science fiction by smacking it down and turning it into a sitcom.

There's a scene where I stopped listening to the dialogue and started simply counting the number of times somebody said 'fuck.' What was the point? How did that add value?

Rock bottom for me was the final "predator killer" scene in the epilogue. The design was comedic. The main character's last comment was the cinematic equivalent of spitting on you after you're knocked down. Ugh.

IMO, the most important element that makes the original superior is the enemy as Unknown and Unknowable. Dutch has no idea what he's up against. The movie progresses through stages of discovery, small victories, like a detective story. In that sense, it can be likened to Alien or Silence of the Lambs. Black's movie seems intended to do the opposite, throwing anything and everything about these new retconned predators in your face, taking away all the fun. Yuck.

And the hero wasn't a punk.

Gripe, grouse.