Predator: Killer of Killers Review - Yeeouch-ah!
Predator: Killer of Killers is technically a Predator movie, but it doesn't really feel like one. Similar to its spiritual predecessor The Animatrix, it's more like a handful of puzzle pieces of world-building lore, combined with an interquel, and an ending that sets up a subsequent movie, if not specifically the subsequent movie, Predator: Badlands. It's closest in vibe to the third canonical Predator film, Nimrod Antal's Predators, which had several different expert killers from Earth assembled and dropped on a hunting planet. While that story focused on their post-capture drama, however, Killer of Killers is almost entirely about its assembled hunters' backstories, all of which involve previous encounters with Predators, here given the onscreen canonical name “Yautja” for the first time in a movie.
It also confirms a long-held fan theory that Yautja can indeed time travel, at least from our perspective (it's always possible their world exists in a different time-speed dimension like Narnia). This fixes the arguable paradox of the Alien vs. Predator movies, which depict Xenomorphs on Earth centuries before David the android “invented” them. Yes, there is some external-to-movie canon that says David simply parallel-developed a Xenomorph similar to one that already existed, but I'm not sure that I buy that, or that Ridley Scott does.
Regardless, Killer of Killers confirms that, while Predators had all the human subjects on that occasion coming from the same time period, the Yautja are not always confined to such linear chronological rules. Nor are they limited by temperature – though many of the movies have suggested the Yautja thrive in heat, and prefer to visit Earth during temperature highs, later filmmakers have clearly felt overly limited by that notion and rejected it as a blanket rule, in part by showing us different Yautja species variants, of which there are several on display here. NECA will have plenty to work with if they hope to keep their action figure line comprehensive.
Director Dan Trachtenberg, who arguably made the second-best Predator movie with Prey, is an avid gamer, and it shows. Not just in the animation, which feels like video game cut scenes, but especially in the way he choreographs his action. A Viking warrior with jagged, broken shields uses them scissor-style to slash opponents into multiple blood geysers like Baraka in Mortal Kombat II, while a Yautja fighter jet fires harpoons into enemy vehicles with precision aim, only to pull them back in a way that satisfyingly rips apart the target and anyone inside it. A viewer with any kind of gaming sense-memory should practically feel the controller vibrate.
As in Prey, this makes the battles more interesting than repeating the more old-fashioned cat-and-mouse of earlier movies in the series. Those worked fine for what they were, but Predator as a franchise has worked best when it does new things, and the giant Pred with a hand weapon that's basically a technological version of Guile's Sonic Boom in Street Fighter II certainly qualifies. With four stories going on in 90 minutes, however, there's less attention to narrative, which has to be boiled down to the fights, like a galactic pro-wrestling show.
Though the animation here is what I'd call adequate, and not especially extra-exciting – it could stand to be more expressive and less literal at times – it does allow for settings that might be prohibitively expensive in live action. In the first segment, a mean Viking mother (Lindsay LaVanchy) looks to avenger her father; in the second, two estranged brothers (Louis Ozawa) in feudal Japan prepare to fight one another as ninja versus samurai; the third features an aspiring World War II pilot (Rick Gonzales) who notices something strange in the air before the actual aces of aviation do. In every case, Yautja interfere, because this is a Predator movie, after all. A final segment pulls everything together before ending on a couple of cliffhangers that may or may not ever be resolved.
One thing Killer of Killers conveys pretty well is that Yautja are not Klingons, with some honor code that a human can respect and appeal to. They're mostly dicks who change the rules to favor themselves. We've seen this from the beginning, when the first Predator fought Schwarzenegger in a stripped-down fight, only to detonate a mini-nuke like a sore loser rather than congratulate a victorious foe. Yet because the Yautja are ostensibly the “good” guys in the battle against Xenomorphs, they've hinted at societal babyface turns in both the AVP movies and The Predator, and civil war-inspired human alliances in Predators. Trachtenberg's Prey brought back the merciless mindset, continued here, though Badlands looks to be a shift that focuses on a Yautja protagonist. It makes sense, when you think about it, that a species obsessed with killing killers would be warlike against other tribes on its own world. After all, we are.
Killer of Killers was presented as a “surprise” movie for streaming, while Trachtenberg officially made Badlands. It always felt like a nice little bonus, and it's little more than that, with a pervading sense that it's mainly filling in holes in the lore, perhaps to set the table for something bigger. In Geekerati terms, it could literally help set a tabletop campaign or two. As a Blu-ray bonus, it would be amazing. As a feature, it's probably for the best that it's on streaming.
PREDATOR: KILLER OF KILLERS debuts on Hulu on June 6, 2025.
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