Predator: Badlands review – a pointless but unkillable franchise that has started to eat itself

The toothy villain is humanised and made sympathetic in this disappointing horror sci-fi – at which point it ceases to be the Predator

There is disappointment in store for those hoping the Terrence Malick classic Badlands had been rebooted as a horror sci-fi, with Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek menaced by a great big space alien with a peculiar mouth. No: this is actually the umpteenth iteration of the Predator franchise, which has a roach-like unkillability itself, having started in 1987 with Arnold Schwarzenegger facing an extraterrestrial creature rustling and snarling in the Central American jungle.

Predator: Badlands is just about kept from flatlining by Elle Fanning’s effortless charm, though it shows what happens when the Predator in question must, in the service of narrative development, be humanised and made sympathetic and vulnerable and … kinda … nice? What happens is that it ceases to be the Predator, so something or someone else has inevitably to fill the Predator role.

So now there is a youngling from the unsightly Predator tribe called Dek (played in heavy prosthetics by New Zealand actor Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi); a creature with those distinctively horrendous choppers with a sort of cluster of mandible claws on it. (A real horror film would also show us what his genitals look like.) Dek’s alleged softness and weakness mean that he is about to be killed by his stern Predator father, but he escapes to go on a mission to reclaim his predatorial honour by killing a far-off fearsome monster called the Kalisk, which even his father is supposedly afraid of.

But Dek finds that two robot-human bioclone twins known as “synths” are on the Kalisk’s trail as well, both played by Fanning. One is goofy, cutesy, fallible Thia, a kind of manic pixie dream synth who winds up having an odd-couple friendship with Dek. The other is a ruthlessly efficient dead-eyed Stepford ninja who winds up being the real hunter-killer and effectively negates the franchise’s whole identity.

The sheer pointlessness of everything that happens subtracts the oxygen and even Fanning’s imperishable star quality can’t save it.

• Predator: Badlands is out on 6 November in Australia, and on 7 November in the UK and US.