FROM one hunt to the next, each bloody battle across time and space, be it against man or some other form of sentient life across the galaxy, the Yautja relish in their primordial culture of hunting prey they deem equal.
Better known as “the Predator” in pop culture, each wound, feat, kill and trophy collected serves as war medals for a Yautja’s prowess. Like the extraterrestrial apex predators, director Dan Trachtenberg too has claimed another gory, blood-soaked trophy with Predator: Killer of Killers.
Set across different time periods, Killer of Killers opens in the frigid northern oceans, as the mighty Ursa (Lindsay LaVanchy) leads a horde of Viking warriors into the stronghold of the Krivich tribe, seeking to take the head of its leader.
Almost a thousand years later, the ninja Kenji (Louis Ozawa) launches a lone attempt to defeat his brother Kiyoshi, a daimyo, in his castle.
Fast forward several hundred years from then, during World War II, fighter pilot John Torres (Rick Gonzalez) finds his squadron under aerial attack and takes to the skies to fight back against someone he believes is not on either the Allies’ or Axis Powers’ side in the war.
The three storylines eventually converge on a planet that a group of Predators have turned into a coliseum.
Past meets Predator
Three years ago, Trachtenberg’s Prey was released to wide acclaim, with one of the big positives being the film’s setting, which took the film’s Predator to 18th century America, pitting a hulking Yautja against Native American warriors from the Comanche tribe.
Trachtenberg stripped the bloated excess that recent films in the franchise had and brought it back to the gritty basics of the first Predator from 1987.
It was also a long-held dream of franchise fans brought to life. A dream born from a single question: “What would a Predator film look like if it took place during a bygone era etched within history books?”
For Killer of Killers, Trachtenberg revisits the same concept, bringing the story to not just one time period, but three separate ones from different corners of the planet.
The film is also inspired by and expands the concept behind 2010’s Predators, where humans are abducted, brought to a different planet, then hunted by the Yautja as wild game.
Thrilling combat, thin characters
LaVanchy, Ozawa and Gonzalez deliver great vocal performances for their distinct characters, but beyond their self-contained story segments, the three lead characters get almost no development. They are introduced and almost immediately face off against the Yautja, before Killer of Killers barrels off into space.
In that regard, despite the solid action sequences that use each character’s distinct fighting styles to great effect, the film is unfortunately lacklustre in substance compared with the much meatier Prey.
However, it may also be intentional as Trachtenberg might be using Killer of Killers as a vehicle to either lay the groundwork or introduce concepts that he will expand more upon in the upcoming live-action film Predator: Badlands, which is set for release later this year.
Predator: Killer of Killers is streaming on Disney+ Hotstar.
