The city after all is unfamiliar terrain and Harrigan has mastered their environment, giving him an edge that he perhaps wouldn't have held in the wild. This one is a bit more headstrong than the first, not afraid to waltz into the middle of firefights and rip Jamaican gangsters to pieces, but also a bit more vulnerable. Harrigan is no hero, he's just a man who's spent more time in the trenches than most.The Hunter meanwhile is still just as formidable in the second round. No disrespect to Arnie, but Glover is also a better actor and inhabits his character completely, going about his job with the same reckless professionalism but also a sense of embittered frustration. Older and wiser but more out of shape than Arnie, he is a far more realistic opponent for the Predator to face than the Governator ever was and shows what happens when your average cop fights the alien, rather than a pumped up superman. Then things get personal when one of Harrigan's friends is killed.Danny Glover is nothing short of brilliant in this film. Setting out to solve the case, Harrigan and his fellow officers pursue the Predator while trying to deal with the drug lords and a Government team that knows more than they are telling.
One horrific burst of mechanised violence later and Harrigan has a mystery on his hands, involving mutilated corpses and an invisible killer who vanished into thin air. Arriving at almost the same time are the veteran police man Mike Harrigan Glover and the Hunter, who watches and waits, selecting targets to add to the trophy cabinet. Fittingly, the film begins with an out-gunned police force struggling to deal with a trigger happy band of Mexican coke pushers. The city is on the brink of collapse, torn apart by street wars between rival drug gangs. And yet despite all this, it's still looked on as the lesser of two movies, when the only argument to suggest this is "cos, you know, Arnie isn't in it is he?"Set in the then-future 1997, Predator 2 negates the rain-forest location by pitting the Hunter into the concrete jungle of LA. Alongside this is Danny Glover's powerful lead role, a vision of Los Angeles as the epicentre of violent culture clashes foreshadowing the racial tensions that led to the 1992 riots and some brutally relentless action sequences.
If it weren't for Predator 2, god knows where we'd be. Alan Silvestri hasn't topped his work from this movie which has to have one of the most complex, layered, and just flat out astounding main themes ever composed for an action movie, or any movie.And of course, it had the cameo that sparked the whole Alien vs Predator phenomenon. Lines weren't meant to become one-liners, they were just so memorable that they ended up that way."You can't see the eyes of the demon, until him come calling." "Okay P-ssy face, it's your move." "Danny Boy."And of course."Want some candy?"Granted, those aren't as good as the classics from the first Predator, like:"You son of a bitch!" "I ain't got time to bleed." "Knock Knock." "Stick around." "If it bleeds, we can kill it." "You are one ugly mother f-er."and of course."AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"Last but not least, the music score from Predator 2 is one of the best ever. This movie is a true, unsung classic of sci-fi, coming from an age when great care was put into genre movies that had strong stories, good characters, and dialogue that didn't sound silly and forced. A sequel without the main character from the fist movie? A whole new setting? This would be seen as too great a risk, but in 1990 movie studios were still run by creative people, not accountants.
It is a breathless series of action sequences strung together so well that it's almost astonishing to look back on it and imagine such effort was crafted to make this movie.This movie would never be made today. Street-roof chase, the slaughter house fight, the roof top fight that spills into the apartment building across the street, the elevator shaft, and finally to the Predator ship itself.