PREDATOR: KILLER OF KILLERS - Mark Reviews Movies

Predator: Killer of Killers, 20th Century Studios

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 5, 2025

Predator: Killer of Killers expands the world of the long-running franchise in such a way that it opens up new possibilities for the future of this series. Director Dan Trachetenberg's animated anthology-style film also stands on its own as an exciting, constantly evolving narrative.

The story here may be little more than an excuse for a series of action setpieces, set within different locations and across various historical periods. However, each of the four tales within the film offers some unique twist on what has become a fairly standard formula within this series.

Trachtenberg, of course, is no stranger to this franchise, since he directed 2022's Prey, which changed up some of that formula by setting the story in colonial North America, circa the early 1700s, and seemingly gave the Predator even-better-than-usual odds in facing off against humans with period-appropriate weaponry. The assorted stories here continue that trend, pitting three different Predators, those ugly alien monsters with advanced technology and weapons, against three humans from distinct eras—two of them even earlier than that in the director's previous installment.

Take, for example, the first tale here, which follows a Viking warrior woman across frigid seas, icy terrains, and a cold-hearted revenge plot during the 9th century. She's Ursa (voice of Lindsay LaVanchy), who has spent decades preparing to fight and kill the rival tribal chief responsible for her father's violent death when she was a child.

Much of these tales, in a way, follow a set pattern, in that we learn just a bit about the back story of each human character and get a bloody taste of the tools of death those characters have at their disposal. Ursa and her clan, including her young and untested-in-combat son Anders (voice of Damien Haas), battle their foe's army with broad swords, heavy axes, and, in the case of our protagonist, a pair of shattered shields. They're broken in such a way that the cracked parts of those defensive tools make for quite the effective means of chopping off limbs and even heads.

Whatever human concerns are at play in each story are swiftly interrupted by the appearance of a Predator. Take the second story as an example of that. It involves a pair of brothers in feudal Japan of the 1600s. Kenji and Kiyoshi (both voiced by Louis Ozawa) don't have much to say as children, when their father pits them against each other to determine which son will inherit his rule over a mountaintop kingdom, or as adults some years later, when the outcast sibling returns to prove his mettle against his brother.

After trying—and, rather amusingly, failing—to sneak his way into the city, the outcast and the new ruler's clash of samurai swords comes to an end when the far stealthier Predator, still capable of cloaking itself in a perfect form of camouflage, determines the winner would be worthy prey for its own hunt. That fight takes the two combatants through the cramped spaces of the castle and across towering, sloped rooftops.

That's to say that each individual story within the anthology also fits within a specific genre, too—from the brutal carnage of the Viking tale to the lightning-fast maneuvers of a samurai fight. To be sure, the animation style, which is intentionally stuttering in its movements (Joshua Wassung, credited as co-director of the project, and his visual effects company oversaw the computer animation), is striking in its look, particularly in the way it brings a specific aesthetic to each period and gives the human characters an appearance that almost possesses the fluid quality of watercolors. Some specific sequences, though, take that frame-skipping motion a bit too far, such as a fight underwater that looks like watching a video game cutscene struggle with out-of-date hardware.

Those choices, which occasionally feel like shortcomings in the technical quality of the film, are only worth mentioning because so much of the aesthetic is successful in bringing the action to life. That's never more the case than during the third story, which follows Torres (voice of Rick Gonzalez), a pilot in the North Atlantic during World War II. While grounded on an aircraft carrier after his plane requires repairs, a Predator spacecraft takes to hunting American fighter planes.

The resulting sequence is a dogfight between the airborne fighters (with Michael Biehn providing the voice of the squad's commander), especially Torres' increasingly jury-rigged plane, and the alien ship, which fires heat-seeking harpoons. It's easily the most imaginative and invigorating section of the entire film—not to mention one of the most memorable action sequences in the entire series. The only downside to this and the other stories, perhaps, is that each of the setups here could have served as the foundation for a standalone, feature-length entry in this franchise, but we should take what obvious bursts of creative inspiration we can get from the sixth installment (not counting those cross-over movies with the other aliens) in an almost-40-year-old series.

There are a surprising number of those bursts in Predator: Killer of Killers, mainly in the construction of this narrative, which offers a diversity of scenarios and action, while also building toward a more overarching climactic showdown that's hinted at in the film's initially flimsy framing device. Each tale here stands on its own in its own particular way, but the whole of the film also stands apart as the best of this series since its beginning.

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