'Predator: Badlands' sticks its 2 stars together to take the franchise to new places

SAN DIEGO (AP) — belongs to a long-established cinema subgenre: two opposed people reluctantly stuck together with a common purpose.

The film, the seventh in the franchise (not counting the offshoots), has the buddy comedy energy that comes with that dynamic. It also belongs to the narrower subgenre of people quite literally stuck together, like 1958's “The Defiant Ones,” in which Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis were fugitives united by chains.