John J. Torres was a United States Navy ensign in Predator: Killer of Killers, voiced by Rick Gonzalez. He learned engines at home before he learned combat, and in 1942 he took a battered Grumman F4F Wildcat after a Yautja fighter tore through the Texas Aces over North Africa. Captain Vandenberg, called Vandy, died in that fight, and Torres wrecked the hunter. After the war a second ship took him from his garage. He woke in an arena with Ursa and Kenji, and he flew Kenji off the Grendel King's world after Ursa stayed behind.
Biography
Earlier Life
Torres grew up around engines with his father, who spoke Spanish at home. He wanted to be a pilot, and he talked about Charles Lindbergh while they worked on a car that would not start. His father told him a dream was useless if he flooded the engine and could not fix it. From then on Torres had to solve those problems himself.
That lesson stayed with him after he entered the Navy. On the carrier, men asked who had taught him to rebuild a radial engine, and he told them he had learned it at home. He reached the war as a mechanic who wanted to fly.
Grounded On The Ranger
In 1942, during the North African campaign, Torres served as an ensign aboard the carrier Ranger under Captain Vandenberg. A malfunction left him on the deck while the Texas Aces went up, and he worked on a plane that would not stay in the air. Mechanic Delgado joked that a grounded pilot was putting wrecks back together. Commander Vandenberg, called Vandy, treated wrecking a plane as easier than repairing one, and he would not let Torres fly again until this one ran.
Vandy asked Torres what flying meant. He treated speed as the throttle and fancy flying as steering. He would not put Torres back in the air until the damaged plane ran. Torres insisted he was a pilot and offered a deal: if the engine ran, Vandy would let him fly. He started the prop, and the machine sputtered. Vandy ordered him to finish the repair and left for the next launch with the rest of the squadron.
The Debris
A returning fighter crashed onto the deck, and the surviving pilot described an aircraft that went for engines and left hooks in the sky. Vandy ordered Torres to have an engine running before he came back, then went up with the others. Torres and Delgado pulled a cold shard out of an engine block. It had cut through metal like a blade, and it did not match any Vichy round on the carrier. Delgado wanted the object left alone.
Torres drilled into the fragment anyway, and it woke, whirred, and threw itself around the shop until Delgado went down. The piece was not Allied salvage and not French ordnance. Torres left the shop sure that something else was flying over the campaign, and that the Texas Aces were going after the wrong enemy.
The Wildcat
Radio range and jamming cut the carrier off from the Aces, and every listed pilot was in the air. Torres took the damaged Wildcat himself, coaxed a weak engine into a start, and climbed after the squadron under the callsign the Bullet. Vandy heard the name on the radio and ordered him back to the carrier. Torres stayed on the frequency because the thing in the sky was not a Vichy fighter, and the Aces were about to meet it in formation.
The squadron claimed a last kill and lined up for one more sweep while Torres tried to warn them off. The other Aces ordered him off the radio. He stayed on the radio, because a warning from the Ranger was not going to come from anyone else. By the time he reached them, the unknown aircraft had begun to cut the formation apart.
The Dogfight
The hunter was a Yautja fighter pilot in a ship built for aerial kills, and it tore through the Texas Aces one plane at a time. Torres warned the others, then watched the alien craft snare aircraft with tethers and fire. A strike opened his own wing, and he hung on the airframe long enough to climb back into the cockpit and keep the Wildcat flying. When only he and Vandy remained, he wanted to return to the carrier and call for backup.
Vandy would not leave. Torres worked out that the hunter tracked heat, so they climbed to cool the engines and hide from thermal sight. Vandy stayed behind in that climb and died. Torres cut his engines, then started them again and led the hunter over Vichy anti-aircraft guns. The alien craft survived that fire. Torres flooded the Wildcat the way his father had taught him, baited the hunter into firing on the stalled engine, and wrecked the fighter. He went into the water, fired a flare, and later reached land.
Abduction After The War
After the war ended, Torres went home to a garage and a medal for the North African fight. He worked on machines at night with a radio on, and he treated his Navy service as over. Crop circles appeared in the field beyond the open doors. A Yautja ship came down over the yard, opened, and took him.
He woke in a cell with gear on his head and no sense of how long he had been under. Guards fitted an explosive collar around his neck and moved him with two other humans who had also killed hunters. He tried the kind of lock work he knew from the brig on the Ranger, and it did not open those doors.
The Arena
The other prisoners were Ursa, a Viking shieldmaiden, and Kenji, a shinobi from a later century, and none of the three shared a language. Torres tried English, then scraps of Japanese from basic training, and got nothing he could use. They were marched into a desert arena on Yautja Prime and presented to a warlord Ursa called the Grendel King. A translator told them to fight to the death, with the winner to face the warlord, and Torres saw the collars as bombs that could take their heads off from the stands.
Handlers gave him a flintlock that did not belong to his century, with powder and shot, while Ursa and Kenji received weapons of their own. Ursa attacked the two men first. Torres loaded the pistol, fired it, and knocked the axe out of her hands. He would not fight them to the death, and he pointed them toward a ship he thought he could fly. When a giant arena beast was loosed, it swallowed him whole. Ursa and Kenji killed the creature from the outside, and Torres cut his way out of its belly after they had almost killed it with him inside.
Escape From The Grendel King
Torres stole a hoverbike, pulled Ursa and Kenji on with him, and shut off the collars when the Grendel King tried to detonate them. The warlord smashed the bike with a thrown bone ax, and the three of them ran for his ship. Torres tried to fly the ship the way he flew a Wildcat, even though the controls were new to him. Ursa and Kenji fought the warlord on the ground and hurt him badly before he recovered. Torres lit the engines and blasted the Grendel King off the hull long enough for the others to get aboard.
The warlord threw a spear that took Kenji's right arm, and soldiers grounded the ship with a harpoon launcher. Ursa told them not to avenge her, then rode her shield down the cable and wrecked the launcher so the hull could leave. Torres got the ship into the air with Kenji beside him. The Grendel King put Ursa back into stasis and sent a hunting party after the two men who had stolen his craft.
Personality And Traits
Torres talked more than the warriors he later stood beside, and he used that talk when they did not share a language. He gave Ursa and Kenji his name and a plan to reach a ship, and he did not drop that plan when they hit him. On the Ranger radio, Vandy and the Aces treated him as a boy who would not follow orders.
Torres solved fights the way his father had solved a flooded engine. Over North Africa he climbed, cut the engines, and flooded a stalled Wildcat so the hunter would fire on the heat. He took off in a plane that barely started, because nobody else was left on the deck. On the alien world he reached for engines again, first on the hoverbike, then in a cockpit he had never trained on.
Behind The Scenes
Rick Gonzalez voiced John J. Torres in Predator: Killer of Killers, the 2025 animated anthology directed by Dan Trachtenberg and Joshua Wassung. Micho Robert Rutare wrote the screenplay from a story he shared with Trachtenberg, based on characters created by Jim Thomas and John Thomas. Gonzalez's chapter, titled The Bullet, was the World War II hunt, with Michael Biehn as Captain Vandenberg and Alessa Luz Martinez as Delgado. Felix Solis voiced Torres's father.
Animation came from The Third Floor, Wassung's studio, which built the film in Unreal Engine as its first full-length animated feature, with more than a hundred artists on the pipeline. 20th Century Animation, Lawrence Gordon Productions, Davis Entertainment, and Toberoff Entertainment produced it, and Benjamin Wallfisch wrote the score. The film began streaming on Hulu in the United States on 6 June 2025, and on Disney+ outside that market, at 85 minutes. Gonzalez had been known for Detective Bobby Reyes on Law & Order: Organized Crime and for Timo Cruz in Coach Carter before the Torres part.
Famous Quotes
- "I'd like to be a pilot one day. What's wrong with that?"
- "Sir, I'm a pilot."
- "There's something else up in the sky, and it's not Vichy fighters."
- "Tex squad, this is the Bullet."
- "I think it only sees heat."
- "So then we climb. We need to cool off these engines."
- "It's a shot in the dark, guys, but I don't think we're on Earth anymore."
- "If we can get up to that ship, I think I can fly us out. I shot one of those down before."
Conclusion
John J. Torres was the Navy ensign who wrecked a Yautja fighter over North Africa in 1942, then was taken from his garage after the war. In the Grendel King's arena he refused a three-way death match, crawled out of the beast that swallowed him, and flew Kenji off that world after Ursa wrecked the harpoon that held their ship.
Appearances
- Predator: Killer of Killers (2025)
Tag Categories: Predator Universe Characters | Predator Lore | Historical Predator Hunts | Predator Hunt Survivors | Predator Killer Of Killers Lore
