This is "Predator" for the 21st Century.

For good and for ill.

"Predator" was a badass action movie. It stared a group of badasses who went into the jungle on a mission, but their old buddy who went into government work got corrupted and lied to them and tricked them into assassinating a bunch of guys by telling them it was a rescue mission (their plan for carrying out the rescue was to fire automatic weapons ALL OVER the address where the rescue victims were being kept somewhere out of sight - basically, they killed every last bad guy so they could rescue people without being pestered by enemy soldiers, but they're not assassins). And then they start getting picked off by whatever killed the last team of assassins, whose failure necessitated sending in the hero assassins rescue team. You can't make that movie anymore. You can't have seven, tough, macho, masculine men, who are good at fighting, not at all sensitive or nice, who demonstrate zero respect for women and make crude sexual jokes and derisively refer to faggots, or at least not in this kind of role, of victims in horror movies. You are supposed to both accept that they have it coming and feel bad for the deaths of such characters. They usually use dumb but attractive teenagers, but Predator did it with badass soldiers, hunting down local guerillas in Central America. That was cool and acceptable in the 1980s - people understood why dead Central Americans was a good thing, they cared about the fates of tough guy soldiers and they took their behavior and humor for what it was.

Nowadays, you can't do that. Movies have a sort of perverse morality, and characters who deviate MUST be punished. Machismo is not celebrated. Killing just for killing cannot be a thing. Artists care more about feelings, without actually FEELING them. They want to analyze and explore them, but don't get very basic emotions like, "doesn't want to get killed and skinned". It's not enough that the characters have a high degree of their own professional skills, they have to get all clever about stuff to show that they are "smart". Humor isn't laughing at one guy's crudely stupid jokes, now it's self-referential snark (which is also why they don't make new movies anymore, just revisting proven properties).

So with that in mind, they made the same sort of movie, but added all the moving parts you need to check off the PC boxes, without having that as part of the story. We were never going to get a REAL sequel to Predator, but we got what 2018 Hollywood could give us.

There is a woman shoehorned in (but so was the woman in the original, and worse, but at least she mostly didn't talk), who's not as a good an actor as the woman in the original, which is unfortunate, because she has to talk a lot. Your mileage may vary, but traditionally, such a woman in such a movie is supposed to be there for looks, and Olvia Munn just does not do it for me. She just looks one bad hair day, or poor makeup choice away from the uncanny valley, IMO. But her character isn't annoying, with showcased or shoehorned toughness, and Munn is pretty game about taking hits and doing pratfalls. All you have to do is ignore the scene where she chases a Predator, pacing it nearly step for step, despite having to watch where she is going and keep an eye on the Predator, in addition to the fact that Munn very much runs like a girl, with those mincing steps that make them the last ones picked for wiffleball in gym class. For some reason, the much more attractive, arguably more accomplished and definitely more competent at the action aspects of the game, Yvonne Strahovsky, who is also in the film, is just there in two scenes, as the mother of the child character.

There is also a child character, BUT he's not as bad as they usually are. He's on the short bus spectrum, so there's no forced cuteness, and while you can probably guess that his mental abberations are going to turn out to be useful, there is an internal justification, rather then the sort of Rain Main, magic-retard syndrome.

Unfortunately, that justification is a very weird twist on the whole Predator thing. They've decided to give the Predators motivations, beyond kill the most dangerous humans they could find, which means the Predators in the movie have conflict, and even minimal dialogue and the ret-conned motivation doesn't exactly track with their behavior in the prior films. Especially 2 and S. And they can communicate with people and understand them and follow clues now.

The PC work-around for the team of badasses this time is a group of military personnel heading for the psych ward, one of whom is in the bunch for claiming to have seen aliens, and he's right. Except he's the closest thing to a main character, and the human the movie has followed more or less from the beginning, so it doesn't exactly have the same ambiguity as Randy Quaid's character from "Independence Day". So these guys are all varying degrees of crazy or afflicted with PTSD, so that way the audience can sympathize with them, instead of running screaming from the theater in reaction to an unapologetic portrayal of toxic masculinity. Now their incorrect behavior can be attributed to their afflictions, and their jokes about each other are okay, because there is preestablished personal consent (that is literally a thing, implicitly stated in dialogue).

The portrayal of "the government" is somewhat inconsistent. Dillon was sort of morally ambiguous - he didn't see himself as a villain, and wasn't trying to get Dutch's team killed, even putting his own ass on the line, and doing his best to pull his weight, he simply had different priorities than did Dutch and both of them worked together, despite their conflict when the possibility of getting skinned or having their spines pulled out arose, without any Paul Reiser-esque counter-indicated shenanigans. That place in this story seems to be occupied by an extension of Gary Busey's outfit from 2 (with an amusing casting allusion to the same), but they are much more antagonistic and unequivocally bad, but that renders certain developments inconsistent to say the least.

As an example of the very current type of self-referential snark and dialogue is a line from the trailer in which Munn's character questions the applicability of the term "predator" to the actual behavior attributed to the creatures in question. Sterling K Brown's character shuts her down, basically citing the Rule of Cool. What's weird about that scene, is that he is more of a bad guy in the film than the Predators in some respects, so it's like they are actually denying the Rule of Cool, AND the ret-conned motivations actually renders inaccurate the snark about the term "predator". That's a definite flaw I am noticing in the genre works these days - they are so eager to prove they're clever with their nerdy deconstructions, that they end up refuting or contradicting their own points. Especially when "predator" as applied to sentient beings, instead of animals, DOES, in fact, refer to recreational violence, rather than survival behavior (i.e. "sexual predator" ).

So it's weird, but completely what you'd expect from the guy who made Iron Man 3 (another film in which the pointlessly added kid was not as bad as usual), in relation to the established intellectual property.

You will have to decide for yourself how you feel about the additions to the Predator family, both as new toys to sell and for the Watsonian explanation for their introduction.