Predator 2 (1990)

Predator 2 arrives in 1990 with the jungle swapped for Los Angeles, a record heat wave, and a turf war between Colombian and Jamaican cartels. The creature now hunts in an urban hot spot, and the film is pleased to be loud, gory, and unapologetically pulpy. It is a sequel with modest ambitions: blow things up, flay a few corpses, send the audience home sticky with sweat.

The cultural ledger is more interesting than the movie. Danny Glover headlines as Lieutenant Mike Harrigan, a Black action lead in 1990, flanked by María Conchita Alonso and Rubén Blades as fellow detectives. The film never remarks on any of it. The casting stays ordinary, no statement is made, though the rarity registers. Detective Leona Cantrell carries a gun and holds her own until the Predator scans her, detects a pregnancy, and spares her. Maternal protection does the work a feminist argument might have done. Roger Ebert saw subliminal racist coding in the creature's design, and the Colombian and Jamaican gang villains are caricatures. The film's racial imagination sits between inert and regrettable.

Everything else is absent. No queer characters or subtext. No environmental sermon, since the heat exists to justify infrared vision. No economic critique, because the villains are cartels and a shadowy government task force, and our sympathies rest with the police. No body diversity, no neurodivergent characters, no revisionist reframing of the historical record (the 1715 flintlock is franchise furniture, not history). And no lecturing, which is the one mercy the film extends. It simply wants to hunt, and it does.