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

“Predator: Badlands” 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 “Alien vs. Predator” 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.

And, in a scenario that provided special challenges for stars Elle Fanning and Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi, “Predator: Badlands” belongs to a still narrower subset it may share only with “The Empire Strikes Back”: movies with a broken android worn like a backpack by a tall and powerful creature as they face peril in a strange corner of space.

“The real physical inspiration for it was C-3PO strapped to Chewbacca’s back,” director Dan Trachtenberg told The Associated Press in an