PREDATOR: KILLER OF KILLERS (2025)

Studio:   20th Century Studios/Hulu
Director: Dan Trachtenberg, Josh Wassung
Writer:   Micho Robert Rutare
Producer: John Davis, Dan Trachtenberg, Marc Toberoff, Ben Rosenblatt
Stars:    Lindsay LaVanchy, Louis Ozawa, Rick Gonzalez, Michael Biehn

Review Score:

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Summary:

Three stories feature a Viking, a samurai, and a WWII pilot battling deadly Predators in different time periods.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

THE SHIELD

In 841 A.D., Ursa sails with a ship of Vikings in search of Chief Zoran, a leader of Krivich tribesmen, who felled her father in battle when she was young. During the voyage, Ursa instructs her son Anders to avenge her if she dies in combat.

Ursa and her fellow Vikings lay waste to a Krivich camp. Ursa tortures the sole survivor for information on Chief Zoran’s whereabouts. After the prisoner provides Chief Zoran’s location, Ursa has her son deliver the killing blow.

Around a campfire, Ursa tells Anders the story of how, when Chief Zoran gravely wounded her father Einar, Einar told Ursa to avenge him before forcing her to thrust a knife into his chest, killing him. She further explains that a rageful “monster” was born in her that day. Meanwhile, a yautja Predator who came to Earth to hunt stalks the Vikings while camouflaged.

Using her bladed shield to rip through enemies, Ursa leads the Vikings in an assault on Chief Zoran’s fort. Upon identifying herself as Einar’s daughter, Chief Zoran taunts Ursa over killing her father. Enraged, Anders kills Chief Zoran.

The Predator decloaks and attacks, brutally slaughtering multiple Vikings. Anders is badly wounded in the melee.

Ursa gets away from the fray by inadvertently falling beneath the ice on a frozen lake. The battle resumes when the Predator finds her. Ursa and the yautja fight above and then below the water, where Ursa ultimately uses an anchor’s chain to pull the Predator into sunken shipwreck debris that impales it.

Ursa returns to her injured son, but Anders tragically dies in her arms. Ursa is later taken prisoner by other Predators and put in stasis aboard a yautja spacecraft.

THE SWORD

In 1609 Japan, brothers Kenji and Kiyoshi are forced by their father to fight as part of their samurai warrior training. Refusing to battle his brother, Kenji throws down his sword. Still wanting to please his father and inherit their family’s suit of armor, Kiyoshi slashes at his brother, inflicting a scar on Kenji’s face. Unwilling to retaliate, Kenji runs away.

Having trained on his own in secret, Kenji returns 20 years later, takes down several guards, and infiltrates the castle where his brother still lives following their father’s recent death. During their subsequent swordfight, Kenji slashes a cut into Kiyoshi’s face to match the one he was given 20 years earlier. However, a railing unexpectedly breaks, causing Kiyoshi to fall a great distance to the ground below.

A yautja suddenly attacks. After the Predator slaughters several guards, its fight with Kenji spills outside where Kenji encounters his brother, who survived the fall. Kiyoshi attacks his brother until Kenji points out they have another enemy they must fight together.

Kenji and Kiyoshi fight the Predator until Kenji uses one of the yautja’s weapons to severely injure it. Able to identify the camouflaged Predator’s location from its glowing green blood, the two brothers use their samurai swords to cut it in half.

After the battle, Kenji and Kiyoshi briefly reconcile just before Kiyoshi falls dead from his injuries. Predators later capture Kenji.

THE BULLET

In 1941 Florida, John Torres, who dreams of becoming a pilot, watches his mechanically gifted father use his intuition to diagnose a problem with John’s car. His father advises John that if he truly wishes to fly planes, he must first learn how to be a mechanic.

Drafted into the military during World War II, John serves aboard an aircraft carrier in the North Atlantic in 1942. Working with a mechanic named Delgado, John tries fixing a plane named “The Bullet,” but he is unable to get it working. Like his father, John’s commanding officer, Vandy, insists John must learn how to properly repair planes before becoming a pilot.

An American aircraft crashes onto the carrier. The surviving pilot warns of an unknown airborne threat, spurring Vandy to scramble his fighter pilots and take to the skies.

From the downed plane’s wreckage, John retrieves what turns out to be yautja weaponry. Realizing Vandy’s squadron is unprepared for the advanced alien danger they’re heading toward, John summons the intuitive skills of his mechanic father to finally get The Bullet working.

John joins Vandy’s squadron in the air, but they are unwilling to heed John’s warning. A Predator spacecraft decloaks and begins attacking, destroying numerous planes. John daringly climbs outside his craft to perform repairs in midair.

Vandy sacrifices himself so John has an opening to attack. John leads the yautja ship into a Japanese warzone where it suffers heavy damage. John then performs maneuvers that lead to the alien craft’s destruction. Falling safely into the water, John fires a signal flare for rescue.

Upon returning home, John takes over his deceased father’s auto garage as a mechanic. A yautja transport ship unexpectedly arrives outside and takes John prisoner.

Wearing bombs around their necks, John is held captive alongside Ursa and Kenji, who were removed from stasis. The three of them are taken to an arena on the yautja home world where the Predator Warlord announces they will be forced to fight to the death to see which survivor will face him for the title “Killer of Killers.” The three humans are armed with weapons from their respective time periods, except for John who mistakenly receives a gun from 1715 that was taken from a previous fight on Earth.

With their language barrier preventing them from communicating that they should work together, Ursa begins attacking Kenji and John. During the arena battle, a massive monster swallows John. Suddenly seeing her dead son Anders reflected in John, Ursa teams up with Kenji to kill the creature. The slain beast is dragged away with John still inside it.

Kenji refuses to continue fighting Ursa. Before the Predator Warlord can detonate their collar bombs for Kenji and Ursa’s disobedience, John unexpectedly returns with stolen yautja technology to rescue them. Using a yautja vehicle, John flies Ursa and Kenji up to the Predator Warlord’s platform.

Kenji loses an arm in the faceoff with the warlord. Ursa helps escort Kenji to a yautja transport ship that John commandeers. However, the Predators fire a harpoon that stalls the getaway ship in the air.

Ursa sacrifices herself to zipline down the harpoon’s chain and release it from the ground. John and Kenji fly away. The Predator Warlord commands a fleet of yautja ships to hunt down the escaped duo. Meanwhile, Ursa is put back into stasis and brought to a storage facility where Comanche War Chief Naru is also held in suspended captivity.

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Review:

Animated anthology film “Predator: Killer of Killers” can be quickly reviewed with a simplified summation. The streamlined stories are highly enjoyable, and they introduce intriguing elements for expanding broader Predator lore. The animation isn’t as hot, burning at a variable temperature tuned to a viewer’s individual tastes. Combine the fiction’s A grade with the animation’s C and you get a solid B baseline, which can then scale in either direction depending on how much one appreciates the vibrant violence and this particular cel-shaded style.

The movie consists of three standalone segments taking place in different historical eras plus a final fourth one where everything comes together. “The Shield” centers on Ursa, a fierce warrior who brings her son on a quest to kill the murderous man who caused her to become a vengeful Viking. “The Sword” follows a 20-year rivalry between two brothers, Kenji and Kiyoshi, who have conflicting views about becoming samurai like their father. “The Bullet” finds struggling mechanic John Torres trying to become a pilot during WWII. Slight spoiler: all of them end up captured in their respective time periods, but they’re pulled out of stasis to battle in an arena on the yautja home world where the last fighter standing will win the title ‘Killer of Killers,’ assuming they can defeat the hulking Predator Warlord first.

Narratively, the stories don’t try anything too fancy. Nor should they, considering they’re so brief, someone could credibly accuse them of being thin. The 80-minute duration divides equally across all four chapters, giving each one roughly 20 minutes apiece. “The Sword” is also completely wordless until four lines are spoken right before it concludes.

The name of the game for “Predator: Killer of Killers” is action. Predators use their distinctive cloaking technology and thermal vision to stalk prey, but only momentarily, and maybe only for fan service. For a majority of the runtime, the film’s focus remains intent on delivering sound and fury in the form of consistently explosive audio and copious carnage.

It’s not just the usual hand-to-hand combat between humans and yautja, either. “The Bullet” takes to the skies for a dogfight between an advanced alien spaceship and American planes from 1942. The final faceoff unexpectedly introduces a massive monster to complicate combat for arena gladiators. In addition to each segment having its own era and weaponry, they also take place in varied locales like icy Scandinavia, a Japanese forest, and the Atlantic Ocean. The filmmakers clearly designed each short to imaginatively use individual environments for inventive setups incorporating frozen lakes, crumbling buildings, and historical context so there’s rarely an opening for the nearly nonstop fighting to feel repetitive.

Even with so much attention paid to dazzling the senses with spectacle, the stories are surprisingly thematic. Each main character’s arc takes them on a short hero’s journey. Confrontations with Predators force them to face fears, find courage, or set aside personal differences to finally overcome an obstacle from their past that prevented them from evolving until the yautja’s challenge. Amid all the swordplay, tracer fire, and bloodshed, it’s easy to lose sight of how much authentic motivation drives the stakes in “Predator: Killer of Killers” beyond simple survival.

Because the movie is so kinetic, the animation has a bad habit of becoming an unfortunate distraction. The art isn’t really the issue. While being far from photorealistic, the designs look something like a cross between Disney’s “Star Wars” cartoons and Netflix’s “The Witcher,” yet with more textured detail.

I’m not versed enough in proper terminology to describe this exactly, but what’s jarring is the animation employs what I’ll call a skip-frame technique, as if every second or third frame is missing so the film looks like a glitchy video playing while buffering. It’s a creative choice, but the style isn’t commonplace enough for average eyes to be immediately accustomed to it. The acquired taste does go down smoother as the movie moves forward. Yet when so many scenes rely heavily on action-oriented imagery, it’s difficult to not notice the jittery delivery.

Of course, viewers who take to the artistic style won’t have this hurdle at their height. Others might not find overwhelming substance in the storytelling. Peeves notwithstanding, everyone should still find a jolting bolt of animated energy, making this a movie for franchise fans who want to sear their eyes with colorful entertainment that proves there are still new Predator sights to see, as series steward Dan Trachtenberg continues to craft clever ways to tell unique tales with their mythos.

Review Score: 80

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