Review: ‘Killer of Killers' honors ‘Predator's' legacy while setting a new gold standard

San Francisco Chronicle​

3 days ago

'Predator: Killer of Killers' is the best movie a 10-year-old boy could ever hope to see. That's because it's really a bunch of bloody, action-filled animated stories in one neat, 90-minute package.
There's a Viking saga that could just as well be called 'Conan the Revenger.' A ninja versus samurai standoff comes next. World War II aerial combat like none you've seen before (well, maybe a bit in the new season of 'Love, Death & Robots') then fills the screen. And it all culminates in a gladiator match with otherworldly monsters.
Of course, there are Predators too. Those trophy hunters from outer space, with advanced weapons and camouflage equipment, raid various time periods and Earth cultures to kill or capture humanity's best warriors. But while the dreadlocked aliens may have superior technology, they don't always succeed.
'Killer of Killers' continues the concept co-director Dan Trachtenberg applied to his 2022 live-action ' Prey,' only with the more elaborate action, wider scope and graceful, graphic kineticism animation can accommodate.
The film's co-director, Joshua Wassung (who also worked on 'Prey'), presumably oversaw its animation aspects. He's the founder and chief creative officer of the Third Floor, which makes its feature animation debut with this project. The company has a long history of creating digital visual effects for films and television shows, but is perhaps better known as a preeminent provider of previsuals for those and other productions.
Previs is a rough animated guide created to work out how scenes will be blocked, shot and later enhanced before cameras roll. They're not meant to be viewed as any kind of final product, and perhaps that explains why the sole aggravating aspect of 'Killer of Killers' is a sometimes jerky movement similar to that of many video games or the cheaper, frame-skipping kind of anime. This is most noticeable in the opening Viking sequence, particularly during that stretch's visceral, blood-and-thunder fight sequences.
There's such beautiful brute force to the overall visual scheme, though, that this feels less distracting as the often headless body count climbs. The Japanese warriors are as agile as any Kurosawa directed (this segment even opens with a leafy homage to 'Yojimbo'). The dogfights over Vichy North Africa swoop and spin with vertiginous torque. By the time Earth's most resilient heroes must face one another, and heaven knows what else in an off-world coliseum, we're fully engaged by the physical struggle to survive.
But what makes these mini-mayhem marathons extra tasty is how most of the protagonists are preoccupied with long-simmering agendas. They at first view the incomprehensible aliens as annoying interlopers impeding their dreams of glory or hate-driven payback. Communication issues are a running theme, adding to the difficulty of surviving the new superseding threat.
Narrative-wise, it's all rather rudimentary but as dramatically effective as a battle-ax dismemberment.
Trachtenberg's next movie, 'Predator: Badlands,' looks like it has enough VFX shots to blur the line between live-action and animation. Whatever that film's aesthetic turns out to be, the director's sensibility breathes exciting new life into a franchise that, let's face it, was an 'Alien' by way of 'Terminator' knockoff from the start. The inclusion of original 'Terminator' star Michael Biehn as a voice actor in 'Killer of Killers' feels intentional, underscoring Trachtenberg's desire to reboot this franchise at a higher level.
The tween boy in all of us should be stoked.