Every Arnold Schwarzenegger Movie Ranked Worst To Best

Predator is the greatest action film ever made, and one that, like Arnold, feels underestimated even with its undisputed place in the genre canon. It was the film that announced John McTiernan to the world - one he'd follow up with classics like The Hunt for Red October and Die Hard - but also a new era for Schwarzenegger. With his action bonafides then well and truly cemented, Predator afforded a space for Arnold to subvert genre tropes and play with his physicality in a considered manner, rubbishing the notion of his perceived onscreen invulnerability in a genre-bending effort just as smart and gripping as Cameron's Terminator.

The genius of Predator lies in its interrogation of genre. While McTiernan would earn these plaudits on Die Hard for casting a lean and vulnerable Bruce Willis as New York cop John McClane, Predator - stacked to the gills with athletes and larger-than-life personalities - was no less introspective when it was released in 1987.

Its cast of immaculate badasses - headed up by Schwarzenegger and the late, great Carl Weathers - enter the film with typical explosiveness, sharing arm-shakes, trading macho dialogue, and laying waste to a compound of generically armed rebels with puns and squibs aplenty. And then they are picked off, one by one, by the seven-foot Predator, a slasher villain from outside our solar system who, like Arnold in previous effort Commando, eats Green Berets for breakfast. In and amongst this genre interrogation is subtext on America's Latin American misadventures - the War on Drugs and the Iran-Contra affair then at the forefront of the news cycle - and also just a rollicking good story, a Sgt Rock adjacent sci-fi horror that fully understood Schwarzenegger's strengths, and birthed what is, in my view, his most definitive performance.

In short, Predator is Arnold Schwarzenegger. It's his strength, his humour - his sheer stogie-smoking force of personality. Better individual performances there may have been, but none exemplify Brand Arnold like McTiernan's masterpiece.