Carl Weathers made Predator’s Dillon a son of a bitch worth mourning

Predator (1987) is, in its own quiet way, an actor’s movie. Yes, Predator has a quiet side. Amidst the jungle-obliterating and spine-ripping, John McTiernan’s action-horror anti-Commando is home to some really fun performances.  

Kevin Peter Hall’s turn as the eponymous Predator breathes life into a great monster design—the Jungle Hunter may hold to a code of honor and fight pragmatically, but he’s a sadist. When he patches his wounds, he grits his mandibles and gets the stapling done because he knows the process and knows his tools. Hall moves through the surgery with practiced, if unavoidably wincing confidence. When he discards most of his gear to duel Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Dutch on more-or-less even terms, Hall builds a sneer into his stride—Dutch may be making the Jungle Hunter work for his skull, but at the end of the day, prey is prey—and when has prey ever matched a hunter? 

Dutch himself may be my favorite of Schwarzenegger’s performances that I have seen. He’s got the steely, hyper-macho Reagan-era confidence, of course, John Matrix’s absurdity echoing still. But up against the Jungle Hunter and watching his men perish in increasingly horrible ways, Dutch strains. He knows he’s failing, and up until he almost literally stumbles into discovering the Hunter’s weakness (he sees in the infrared spectrum, and so struggles to distinguish objects that are the same temperature), he’s openly, genuinely terrified of his foe.

And then there’s the late, great Carl Weathers, whose soldier-turned-CIA-creep Dillon is the most complex character in Predator—a role that sees Weathers thread a tricky dramatic needle with skill and panache.
Even setting aside the CIA’s ’80s-era viciousness, Dillon is an awful man. His first act in Predator is to betray one of his oldest friends—manipulating Dutch and his team into destroying a guerilla encampment as a “rescue mission,” rather than the outright smash-and-grab it is. He did this knowing full well that Dutch would not agree to the job if he was told what it really was, and brushes off his friend’s subsequent anger as expected, if disappointing. He responds to Dutch’s concern for his team’s lives with callousness. It’s the Cold War. Everyone is an asset. Everyone is  expendable, and they need to get with the program and live with that. He is, in Dutch’s immortal and at-the-time-affectionate words, a “son of a bitch.” Because he has to be, because that’s how the Cold War has to be fought.

Dillon mostly believes this. Mostly. But watch Weathers’ eyes when he furiously tries to justify his actions to Dutch. Betraying Dutch hurts—not only because Dillon’s breaking his friend’s trust and endangering his life, but also because the betrayal itself underlines how far they have grown apart. Dutch has kept his integrity. Dillon has resigned himself to shutting off his care for the men under his command—even as he realizes how much he misses fighting alongside his friend and their looking out for each other.

As Weathers plays him, Dillon is a deeply unhappy man. The fight is the fight, and he’s as all in on it as his short-lived Soviet counterpart (a similarly vicious dude). War inherently dehumanizes. Allies are assets. Civilians are numbers. The enemy is the enemy. It’s one thing to live with that in an office and a dreadful short sleeve shirt-and-tie combo. It’s another thing to try and hold onto that in the face of something hunting you and your recently-and-bitterly-estranged friend and his men for sport. Not even just hunting, but mutilating and toying with and dehumanizing in a far more visceral fashion than Cold War spycraft protocol.

The Jungle Hunter’s attack shocks and traumatizes Dillon, Dutch, and his men. Mac (Bill Duke) grows steadily more detached from reality, retreating into memories of his friendship with Blain (Jesse Ventura). Billy (Sonny Landham) grows fatalistic to the point that he tries for a Gandalfinian last stand that accomplishes nothing despite his good intentions. Dutch does his damndest to keep cool. And Dillon tries to keep up with his merciless CIA hardass act, downplaying the reality of the Jungle Hunter’s existence as long as possible, then downplaying his possible threat once his existence becomes undeniable. Weathers ups the bluster and the pomp to cope with the increasing terror of the Jungle Hunter. 

Until he cannot. Until the team’s ambush ends in calamity, and neither the Jungle Hunter nor his brutality can be denied any longer. Faced with the doom his deceit brought to Dutch, Dillon steps up. He’s too much of a realist to believe he’ll come out on top, but he has to do something. On a practical level, he’s got to buy time for Dutch and the remaining members of his team to get to the chopper. On an emotional level, facing the Jungle Hunter is as close to a direct apology to Dutch as Dillon can get—they do not have the time or the space to truly repair their relationship, so they make do with the recognition that while Dillon almost certainly cannot defeat the Jungle Hunter, he might be able to “get even.”

For Dillon’s last scene, Weathers doesn’t play him as a man at peace—getting your arm shot off by a plasma cannon and then being impaled by a murderous space sadist just is not conducive to going out like Obi-Wan Kenobi. But he goes down about as well as anyone in Predator can. His courage holds, and even when he’s literally disarmed, he manages to beat the Jungle Hunter on the trigger. Where before Dillon told himself that he was reconciled to violence and its consequences, in his last stand he's managed to truly achieve that reconciliation—not peace, but acceptance.

Through Weathers’ performance, Dillon’s treachery—for all its alleged pragmatism—haunts him. His camaraderie with Dutch is genuine, giving their estrangement a welcome sting and their pseudo-reconciliation a bit of warmth amidst the single bleakest stretch in Predator. It’s terrific work in one of the great action/horror movies, a performance to celebrate Carl  Weathers’ life and times. He was here. May his memory go forward.