The Predator gets hot in the city.
The Los Angeles of Predator 2 is a sweltering, chaotic powder keg of urban decay, gang warfare, and police burnout, the kind of setting that you could imagine would attract a predator whose had enough of being hoodwinked by mud. Predator 2 swaps the verdant rainforest for the concrete jungle, the SpecOps for beat cops, and in doing so, it becomes one of the boldest sequels of its era: a film that dared to do something different to the original’s stripped-down survival horror and drag it, kicking and screaming, into a dystopian then near-future America audiences already believed was coming.
With Los Angeles buckling under a record heatwave, gang warfare, and an overstretched police force, Lieutenant Mike Harrigan (Danny Glover) tries to hold on to order amid a string of increasingly grotesque murders. When federal agents led by Peter Keyes (Gary Busey) seize control of the case, it becomes clear the city has attracted the attention of an extraterrestrial hunter on an urban safari.
Danny Glover’s Harrigan is about as far from the muscle-bound archetype of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Dutch as you can get; he’s a weary, street-wise detective trying to keep control of a simmering warzone. Where Dutch was a hunter learning humility, Harrigan is already neck-deep in the chaos, relying on stubborn instinct to survive a city that’s tearing itself apart. Glover grounds the film in exasperation rather than bravado, turning fatigue into a kind of ablative armour. Gary Busey’s federal agent Peter Keyes provides the foil: a man of theory and procedure who thinks he can outthink a creature built for killing. The tension between Glover and Busey is electric; two men on opposite sides of the same losing battle.
Fresh off the franchise baggage-laden A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child, Stephen Hopkins finds a visual language for panic: a restless camera, a constant cacophony of danger, and a colour palette that feels perpetually greasy and sunburnt. Hopkins would go on to make Judgment Night, Blown Away, The Ghost and the Darkness and the pilot of 24, but Predator 2 might be the purest expression of his style: kinetic, volatile, and teetering on the brink of combustion. His Los Angeles isn’t simply background; it’s a living thing, thrashing and sweating through the film, loud and angry as Hell itself.
The supporting cast gives the chaos human shape. Maria Conchita Alonso’s Leona Cantrell and Ruben Blades’ Danny Archuleta bring grit and camaraderie to the precinct, while Bill Paxton unsurprisingly steals every scene as the swaggering Detective Jerry Lambert, the loudest man in any room until the Predator shuts him up for good. It’s the film that sees Paxton complete a rare cinematic hat-trick, becoming the first – and arguably only – actor to have been killed on screen by a Terminator, an Alien, and a Predator.
Stan Winston and his design team evolve the Predator without overdoing it: the new armour gleams with ceremonial menace, the expanded arsenal hints at unseen traditions, and the trophy room scene still sends shivers through franchise fans. Hopkins and Winston resist the temptation to explain too much; mystery remains the creature’s greatest weapon while Alan Silvestri’s score bridges the primal and the urban, folding tribal beats into something jagged and percussive, perfectly tuned to the chaos.
When Predator 2 arrived in 1990, audiences didn’t quite know what to do with it. A little too violent for the mainstream, and too sharp a turn for the fans of the first movie, it fell into a strange critical limbo. Yet time has been kind and its vision of overheated cities, weaponised media, and bureaucratic overreach feels more like prophecy than pulp. Hopkins’ Los Angeles teems with hunters of every kind: gangsters, cops, politicians, aliens, each driven by the same instinct to dominate, making Predator 2 less a creature feature than a nature documentary about the competing apex predators of the concrete jungle.
