The “Predator” Franchise Isn’t Messing Around with its “Prey” (Review)

There were several hurdles facing Prey even before its release. First (and perhaps most glaringly) was that the Predator franchise had infamously tired itself out, with Shane Black’s 2018 entry seemingly ending the series after a poor box office performance. The once-epic and macho-driven franchise seemed to be running out of ideas, despite lots of unresolved promise in recent installments.

So what did Prey do? It does what any effective prequel does and brings everything back to the basics. In fact, it’s so dedicated to being a prequel that it’s set over 250 years before the original Predator, and it works as a decoupled prologue to the series without interfering with any canon or lore — this is in comparison with Shane Black’s film, which tried far to hard to establish the opposite.

Image courtesy of 20th Century Studios

Set in 1719, Prey (the best title this film could have chosen) follows a young Comanche woman, Naru (a perfectly-cast Amber Midthunder), who was trained as a healer but longs to become a hunter like her brother Taabe (Dakota Beavers). Naru is already a capable warrior, but in order to prove her skill to her tribe, she pursues the arrival of a mysterious figure — and we all know where this is going. What Naru believes to be a mystical Thunderbird is actually a spaceship dropping off a Yautja warrior, known colloquially as a Predator of a Hunter. Still, she takes this as a sign, and it ends up being very beneficial for her; she soon finds herself going head-to-head with one of the fiercest beings in the known universe.

“The Valet” Proves the Traditional Rom-Com Still Lives (Review)

If you are a regular watcher of movies, you’ve undoubtedly seen your fair share of romantic comedies. After a while, you will start to pick up the tropes and typical story structure, and it becomes easier and easier to predict what will happen in any given movie. Sometimes, that can make rom-coms a chore, but in the case of The Valet, a remake of a French film of the same name, it actually makes the experience better.

Image courtesy of Hulu

Eugenio Derbez, best known to me as the music teacher from this year’s best picture winner, CODA, plays Antonio, a valet who gets roped into a Hollywood scandal by unfortunate circumstance: he crashes his bike into the car of movie star Olivia Allan (Ready or Not’s Samara Weaving), just as the paparazzi photograph her with the married man that she is having an affair with. Played by New Girl's Max Greenfield, the married man is a senator, or a councilman, or a realtor — I honestly couldn’t tell you which one — but to cover up the affair, he pays Antonio to step into the public eye and pretend to be Olivia’s boyfriend.