Wesley Fenlon | Not with a bang but a whimper.

1. LA Sucked in 1997

One of cinema’s oldest, most hilarious practices is to set a movie a few years in the future and predict that just a little ways down the road everything will, inexplicably, go all to hell. I still remember the beginning of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, in which a foreboding narration informs us that the year is 1991, and cats and dogs are totally extinct.

Predator 2, set a mere 7 years into the future at the time of its release, portrays Los Angeles as a warzone: desperate cops have firefights in the streets against gangs and drug lords. I guess we’ve cleaned the place up a bit in the past decade, huh?  And by we, I actually mean Danny Glover.

What can I say. The man can drive. He’s also good at massacring drug dealers, but that’s just not as original or cool, really.

It just gets better from here.

2. Motherfucker is an insult in all languages

Apparently, in their long years of stalking members of the human race like the clueless sheep we are, the Predators learned how to speak English.  In the classic confrontation scene at the end of the original Predator, Schwarzenegger watches in awe and horror (a range of emotion we don’t often see from the Governator) and rightly proclaims what we’re all thinking “You are one ugly motherfucker.”

In Predator 2, they’ve apparently grown aware of how totally ass-hideous they are: as Danny Glover starts to insult the Predator’s looks in a Schwarzenegger homage, the alien completes the thought with his own gravelly, rumbling exclamation of “motherfucker!”

Not to be missed: Danny Glover calling the Predator “vaginaface.”  I didn’t think about it at first, but it is so true.

3. Danny Glover can climb

If you hadn’t picked it up from this post alone, Danny Glover is a total badass.  In fact, if you didn’t know that already, you probably missed out on something glorious in your childhood (see: Lethal Weapon 1-4).  General bad-guy-killing, crazy-driving, tough-talking badassery aside, Danny Glover does something I have never seen in a film before: he climbs ladders like a bat out of hell.  Seriously, it’s uncanny.

When the man wants to move, he moves.  Maybe having a Predator on your tail is significant encouragement to move it, but I like to think that’s just one of the many natural talents Danny Glover brings to the table.