Latest news with #KillerofKillers'
Yahoo
11-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Predator: Killer of Killers' Review: Hulu's Awesomely Violent Animated Death Match Highlights the Full Potential of the Franchise
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. More from IndieWire Does 'Materialists' Satisfy as a Romance? Screen Talk Debates Celine Song's Film, Shares 'F1' First Reactions 'I Don't Understand You' Review: Nick Kroll and Andrew Rannells Kill It in Grisly Destination Rom-Com 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. 'Predator: Killer of Killers' will be available to stream on Hulu starting Friday, June 6. Want to stay up to date on IndieWire's film and critical thoughts? to our newly launched newsletter, In Review by David Ehrlich, in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the best new reviews and streaming picks along with some exclusive musings — all only available to subscribers. Best of IndieWire The 25 Best Alfred Hitchcock Movies, Ranked Every IndieWire TV Review from 2020, Ranked by Grade from Best to Worst
Yahoo
11-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The Beautiful, Brutal Action of ‘Predator: Killer of Killers'
For director Dan Trachtenberg, 'Prey' was only the beginning in time-jumping the 'Predator' franchise back to the Comanche Nation 300 years ago. With 'Predator: Killer of Killers,' Trachtenberg not only embraces animation for the first time but also expands the time-jumping motif in an anthology film that spans Scandinavia in 841, feudal Japan in 1609, and the Battle of the Atlantic in 1942. This means Predators fighting Vikings, samurai, and ninja, and World War II fighter pilots. The surviving humans then compete gladiator-style on the Predator planet, eventually going up against the titular 'Killer of Killers' Yautja. More from IndieWire Wayward Teens Find Solace in Horse Country During Sundance Award-Winning 'East of Wall' Trailer 'Inside' Review: Guy Pearce Delivers Another Incredible Supporting Performance in Australian Prison Drama That Cuts Through All the Bull 'It was really a pleasure to experiment and find crazy notions and ideas, and then let them literally just be that way,' Trachtenberg told IndieWire. ' It was pure indulgence. And, of course, marrying that with stories that are really emotional and intense, and characters that are facing conflicts before the Predator even shows up.' In 'The Shield,' Viking warrior Ursa (Lindsay LaVanchy) leads her clan on an expedition to avenge the death of her father and faces off against the Predator Brute, equipped with a sonic charge from a wrist gauntlet. In 'The Shield,' two warring brothers, samurai Kenji and exiled ninja Kiyoshi (Louis Ozawa), take on the Predator Assassin, who wields, among other things, a spear that transforms. And in 'The Bullet,' aspiring pilot Torres (Rick Gonzalez) goes up against Pilot Predator and his high-tech spaceship in a dog fight. Trachtenberg, who made 'Killer of Killers' simultaneously with the upcoming live-action 'Predator: Badlands' (November 7), was eager to explore all three underdog stories in a painterly CG style of animation similar to Netflix's Emmy-winning 'Arcane.' Joining him as co-director was Josh Wassung, co-founder of acclaimed visualization studio The Third Floor, which has a long association with Marvel. Wassung has worked with Trachtenberg on many of his projects as well, and convinced him after some tests that his company was prepared to tackle an animated feature for the first time. 'The test results were very cool and they all had something to prove, which ignited things, and I'm thrilled that people are responding to the animation because a lot of people worked really hard,' Trachtenberg said. 'What's rewarding is that the animation medium allows for a lot of experimentation because it is so art forward that something can be both beautiful and brutal, which is an aesthetic that I'm always fascinated by and prefer to engage in.' This allowed more daring creature design, fight choreography, camera movement, and lighting. 'We have to figure out how to get a guy in his suit and it changes a little bit, and then we can only film it for it to hold up in live action,' added Trachtenberg. 'So the designs really become stylized and move in ways we always hoped they could move. And all of that was something that we could only make in this kind of movie.' Of all the creature designs, the Predator Brute proved the most challenging. ' Where do they go? How do they fit? How can we best use them? And when that leapt to the forefront of, 'Oh, my gosh, that's definitely the Viking era Predator,' we realized it was now going earlier even than 'Prey' was. It tasked us with figuring out it's gotta have tech, but it has to still feel pre from what 'Prey' had,' the director said. Trachtenberg was also proud of the 'Back Biter' creature featured on the Predator planet. ' I think that was Josh's idea to put the mouth on the back of the head,' he said. 'It became my favorite idea of the whole thing. What a cool design. I would love to do more movies with just that creature.' But linking the three stories to generational conflicts set in different periods is what most animated Trachtenberg. ' There's a line in 'Magnolia' that says, 'You may be done with the past, but the past ain't done with you.' And that is a theme that I think is the most important one for us to examine, period,' he said. 'And so whenever there's a chance to tell a story about generations dealing with things, characters trying to break cycles, and underdogs, that is what I find most compelling. So this movie really has all of those things.' 'Predator: Killer of Killers' is now streaming on Hulu. Best of IndieWire The Best Thrillers Streaming on Netflix in June, from 'Vertigo' and 'Rear Window' to 'Emily the Criminal' All 12 Wes Anderson Movies, Ranked, from 'Bottle Rocket' to 'The Phoenician Scheme' Nightmare Film Shoots: The 38 Most Grueling Films Ever Made, from 'Deliverance' to 'The Wages of Fear'
Tom's Guide
06-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Tom's Guide
'Predator: Killer of Killers' on Hulu brings back the thrill of the hunt — and it's the most fun I've had in ages
'Predator' has always had a special place in my movie-loving heart. There's just something truly great about the idea of the galaxy's ultimate hunter going against some of the strongest humans throughout time. So when I heard Hulu was releasing a new animated entry in the franchise called 'Predator: Killer of Killers' (directed by Dan Trachtenberg, no less), I was immediately all in. I'll admit, I had high hopes. 'Prey' was a phenomenal surprise that reminded everyone just how good a 'Predator' movie could be. And while 'Killer of Killers' doesn't quite knock it out of the top spot, it absolutely earns the silver medal. And yes, that includes placing it above the original. This thing rules. From the opening minutes, it delivers exactly what I want from a 'Predator' story: brutal combat, clever kills and characters who don't go down easy. What really surprised me, though, was just how fun it all is. For a franchise that often leans gritty, 'Killer of Killers' finds a sweet spot between savagery and style. If you're a longtime fan like me or just someone who loves a well-crafted action thrill ride, this latest installment is some of the most fun I've had with 'Predator,' and it's now streaming on Hulu. Here's why this one's worth the hunt. 'Predator: Killer of Killers' is a Hulu-exclusive animated anthology movie that features three standalone stories set in wildly different time periods, each centered around a deadly clash between a skilled human warrior and a relentless Predator. The first chapter takes place in Viking-era Scandinavia, where a hardened raider, accompanied by her young son, goes on a brutal quest for vengeance after her village is decimated. Her path leads her into the wilderness, where she encounters something far more dangerous than any clan rival. The second story unfolds in feudal Japan, where two estranged brothers — one a disciplined samurai, the other a stealthy ninja — are forced into a confrontation over the future of their clan. Their final showdown is interrupted by a new kind of enemy. The final tale jumps to the skies of World War II, where an Allied fighter pilot begins noticing strange disappearances during missions over Europe. A routine investigation turns into a desperate fight for survival when he realizes an invisible enemy is stalking him from above. 'Killer of Killers' stands out from the rest of the franchise in two big ways: It's beautifully animated, and it tells three separate stories that ultimately converge. Right from the start, it's clear this is a 'Predator' movie that dares to do something different, and it succeeds on every level. The stories told are impactful and actually quite clever, using personal conversations and animated facial expressions to make us care about the characters. Not to mention the voice acting, which makes every scene feel that much heavier. Out of all three stories, the feudal Japan segment absolutely stole the show for me. It's the quietest of the trio (almost entirely free of dialogue), but that silence speaks volumes. What unfolds is a visually stunning, tension-soaked battle between a disciplined samurai and his estranged ninja brother. It's rare that a 'Predator' story feels this elegant. Like 'Prey,' which gave us a Predator perfectly matched to the time of the Comanche warriors, 'Killer of Killers' does something similar. Each Predator is tailored to its setting, both in design and behavior. The one in Viking-era Scandinavia is a hulking, primal force. The Japan segment gives us a fast, silent hunter who moves like a ghost. And in the World War II chapter, the Predator is almost machine-like as it flies a spacecraft. It shows that the creators put real care into adapting the Predator design and behavior to fit the culture and era. The animation style in 'Predator: Killer of Killers' really caught my eye, and it makes sense considering it took inspiration from 'Arcane' and 'Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.' It's a bold choice that gives the movie its own unique vibe while still staying true to the gritty, savage spirit of the iconic franchise. Honestly, it's one of the reasons I had such a great time watching it. Most of all, 'Killer of Killers' knows exactly how to be a standout 'Predator' movie. There's plenty of carnage and brutal deaths, including a Predator that wears multiple spines as a cape (yes, really). So, if you're a fan of the franchise, be prepared for the gory action you expect. 'Killer of Killers' is a really fun ride, and I'm glad to see the franchise keeping up its good streak after 'Prey.' Here's hoping 'Predator: Badlands,' coming later this year, can keep the momentum going. If you're even remotely a fan of the 'Predator' franchise or just love stylish action with serious bite, 'Killer of Killers' is absolutely worth your time. It's bold, beautifully animated, and packed with moments that'll leave your jaw on the floor. Each segment brings something new to the table, and together they create one of the most memorable entries in the franchise. So do yourself a favor: Fire up Hulu, hit play and enjoy one of the coolest surprises of the year so far. For even more streaming recommendations, see what else is new on Hulu in June 2025. Stream "Predator: Killer of Killers" on Hulu now.
San Francisco Chronicle
06-06-2025
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
Review: ‘Killer of Killers' honors ‘Predator's' legacy while setting a new gold standard
'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.
