‘Predator: Killer of Killers’ Review: Hulu’s Awesomely Violent Animated Death Match Highlights the Full Potential of the Franchise

The Predator fights the greatest warriors across human history in a gloriously fun streaming treat co-directed by "Prey" mastermind Dan Trachtenberg.

An awesomely violent and artfully staged piece of animated pulp, “Predator: Killer of Killers” feels like a movie that was dreamed up by a couple of stoned teenage boys in a suburban basement one night during the summer of 1987, but this is the rare case where that feels like a good thing. A very good thing, even. 

Close your eyes and you can practically hear Dan Trachtenberg — whose impressive “Prey” made him the de facto thought leader of the “Predator” franchise — passing a miserable blunt to screenwriter and co-director Micho Robert Rutare as one of them asks “Who would win in a fight: a Predator or a ninja? What about a Predator or a Viking?” These are some of the great questions of our time, and “Killer of Killers” answers them with enough style and savagery to share a sweet little contact high with everyone who streams it. 

The project’s charm lies in the fact that it doesn’t try to do anything else. An anthology-like collection of death matches in which cinema’s most toxically militaristic alien species hunts the greatest human warriors across our planet’s history, “Killer of Killers” is so mission-driven and self-possessed that it never feels the least bit like an elaborate teaser for Trachtenberg’s forthcoming “Badlands” (a theatrical release that will determine the continued viability of the “Predator” franchise), even if it does a phenomenal job of convincing people to give a shit about the “Yautja” again — or for the first time. 

All red meat and no gristle, “Killer of Killers” leapfrogs through the centuries — with occasional flash-forwards into sci-fi territory — as if it were using the “Assassin’s Creed” games like a treasure map. The action starts on the shores of Valhalla circa 841 A.D., where a vengeance-obsessed valkyrie named Ursa (voiced by Lindsay LaVanchy) leads her son Anders on a raid to kill the barbarian king who ransacked her village when she was a child. “Why do we fight?,” she asks the boy. “Because our enemy still lives,” he replies. 

Locked into the siege like Timothée Chalamet at a Knicks playoff game in Indiana, the invisibility-cloaked Predator who’s watching from the sidelines may have traveled hundreds of light years for a front-row seat to the carnage, but that sort of zero-sum ethos surely reminds him of home. The alien’s plan is the same across the first three of the movie’s four segments: Let the humans slaughter each other, and then ambush the last — and presumably strongest — warrior standing as a test of its own skill as a hunter. One second Ursa is standing triumphant over the corpse of her enemy, and the next her minions are screaming “Grendel!” as the Predator starts ripping their spinal cords out of their backs and/or pulverizing their bodies into red mush. 

While those combat tests have a tendency to be wildly unfair (I’m not sure what a Predator would prove to itself by using a space-age shockwave gun to obliterate a guy holding a wooden spear, but maybe a red-blooded American man who shoots forest animals for sport could explain it to me), the Yautja also have a tendency of failing them in spectacular fashion, as it quickly becomes clear that people are still the most dangerous game. Contextualized as a duel between two different breeds of “monster” (one being Ursa’s bloodlust, and the other a demon from outer space), the battle that comprises much of the opening chapter is nothing less than nerd-ass shit par excellence. 

As in subsequent episodes, the movie’s “violence is unevolved” moral framing doesn’t stop Rutare and Trachtenberg from choreographing the Viking vs. E.T. fight with fetishistic grace, particularly because the CG animation — stilted in its faux-rotoscoped movement, but soaked with the detail and lush ferity of a classic graphic novel — allows them to stage action that would be impossible to sell (or afford) in live-action. Moving away from green screen, the Volume, and other sources of sludgy-looking FX also gives the filmmakers license to make fantastic use of their characters’ environments. 

A good time for its gore alone, the Ursa brawl is made all the more satisfying because of how cleverly she weaponizes Viking ships against against the Predator, in much the same way as the Japan-set episode that comes next takes full advantage of Tokugawa period architecture as a shinobi hops around a 17th century fortress with a Yautja on his tail (no spoilers, but let’s just say the Predators are ill-prepared to fight on the Kawara tiles that lined every 17th castle from Edo on out).

If “The Sword” maxes out all of the cultural tenets you’d expect an American cartoon like this to exploit, Rutare and Trachtenberg solve the triteness of its story — two brothers, raised by their father as bitter rivals, fight to the death in order to prove their supremacy — by embracing its basicness. Almost entirely wordless from start to finish, the segment pares the sibling rivalry down to its purest level so that it can distill what its characters might be capable of achieving together if they ever fought as one… a theme that “Killer of Killers” will return to with a vengeance in its out-of-this-world fourth segment.

But in order to reach those heights, the movie first has to take to the skies, which it does in a 1942-set chapter about a wide-eyed Navy mechanic (voiced by Rick Gonzalez) who steals a rickety old plane and flies into battle against the Nazi fleet after he becomes convinced that something else has been hiding in the clouds and shooting down all his friends. This episode is slow to take off, as it starts by doubling down on the film’s recurring fixation with children proving themselves to their parents (a relevant motif in a franchise preoccupied with self-worth, but one that “Killer of Killers” can only glance at between grudge matches), and its chatty protagonist grows tiresome in a hurry. 

But once he’s airborne, Rutare and Trachtenberg delight in orchestrating some ultra-graphic aerial mayhem, as our hero tries to outfox a heat-seeking alien jet from the cockpit of a busted tin can. Tom Cruise might have a slight edge when it comes to realism, but Rutare and Trachtenberg giddily compensate for that with stratospheric nose-dives and hailstorms full of disembodied limbs. The gore never quite reaches “Ninja Scroll” levels or anything like that, but “Killer of Killers” is able to maintain a rock-hard R without ever lowering itself to the level of empty titillation. 

By that point in the movie, there’s little mystery left as to what Rutare and Trachtenberg are building toward for a grand finale: A melee that will somehow blend Ursa’s ambivalent revenge with the ninja’s regretful lonerism and the flyboy’s inextinguishable resourcefulness. This final segment is a bit sillier and more cartoonish than the ones before it, as “Killer of Killers” is suddenly forced to juggle a variety of (very) different personalities on a hostile alien world whose rules and physics are as rooted in fiction as the film’s previous settings were rooted in fact, but there’s a satisfying concision to how the script pulls all of its various stories together, and — for a project that could have felt like nothing but fan service — I appreciated that Rutare and Trachtenberg save their movie’s only explicit allusion to the rest of the “Predator” franchise until the end credits. 

Running a very tight 80 minutes or so between titles, “Killer of Killers” doesn’t pretend to be a blockbuster-sized entry in a series that has always struggled to find the right scale for itself, but it even more adamantly refuses to be the sort of throwaway junk that we’ve been conditioned to expect from straight-to-streaming spinoffs, remakes, sequels, and the like. Fantastic as this film would be to see on the big screen, I’d go so far as to say that this is what streaming should be for: Immaculately crafted bonus treats that stand on their own two feet and demand to be watched with both eyes at the same time as they serve to reinforce the primacy of the theatrical releases that prop them up. In a bottomless content abyss where only the strongest material survives, “Killer of Killers” should have no trouble slaying the rest of its competition on your Hulu home page. 

Grade: B+

“Predator: Killer of Killers” will be available to stream on Hulu starting Friday, June 6.

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