Quinn McKenna was a United States Army Ranger sniper in The Predator, played by Boyd Holbrook. On a hillside in Mexico he shot a drug lord, then took a mask and a wrist gauntlet from a crashed fugitive hunter and mailed them to his house. Project Stargazer treated him as a witness to lock away. He left a prison bus with a group of military patients called the Loonies, reached his son Rory ahead of a second, larger hunter, and lived through the fight in the Georgia woods.
Biography
Earlier Life
McKenna was a captain and sniper in the 75th Ranger Regiment before the Mexico assignment. He was separated from Emily McKenna, who stayed in Georgia with their son. Rory was twelve, on the autism spectrum, and a chess player at Lawrence A. Gordon Middle School. Emily painted and had bought him two Halloween costumes he would not wear. Quinn's mail went to a post office box with unpaid fees, so a parcel addressed to him did not reach the house until the box dumped it on the floor.
The Monterrey assignment was a hostage situation on a jungle hillside. McKenna was in a ghillie suit with a scoped rifle when an unidentified spacecraft came down nearby.
The Crash Outside Monterrey
McKenna had the drug lord Gutierrez in his rifle scope on a jungle hillside outside Monterrey when a damaged hunter ship sheared a radio tower and bounced across the valley. Gutierrez's men were holding a hooded woman and a boy. McKenna took the shot, killed Gutierrez, and followed the burn scar to a small pod that looked more like a broken insect than a ship. A bio-mask and a wrist gauntlet were in the wreckage, and the gauntlet locked onto his arm.
His spotters reached the crater first. Haines dropped from a tree, opened from chest to gut. A cloaked figure put a plasma bolt through Dupree. McKenna fell through the open hatch, lost his rifles, and fired the gauntlet by accident. The blast knocked the cloak off the Fugitive Predator, destroyed the tree, and left him looking at mandibles and a face he later compared to a shark, a crab, and a warthog at once.
Mailing The Mask Home
A cloak marble from the gauntlet hid him while he ran from CIA agent Will Traeger and the mercenaries who wanted the passenger and the pod. In a cantina he paid the bartender to mail the mask and the gauntlet through the consulate, then swallowed the marble in a shot of tequila as the sirens arrived. He expected a cell if he kept the gear on him, and the consulate parcel was the only way to get it out of Mexico before Traeger's people searched him. Unpaid fees on his post office box dumped that parcel on the floor of the family house in Georgia.
Rory McKenna opened the parcel in the basement. He was twelve, attended Lawrence A. Gordon Middle School, and played chess there. The helmet did not fit his head. A trapezoid remote slid out of the gauntlet, and the symbols on it were a puzzle he could work. When he reversed a command sequence, a larger hunter ship dropped its cloak in open space, and jets went up after the ion trail.
Meeting The Loonies
Traeger's people put McKenna through a fake psychiatric evaluation at a Veterans Administration office in Chattanooga and onto a prison bus with other military cases. He told Nebraska Williams he had met a space alien. Nebraska believed him. On the same bus were Coyle, Baxley, Lynch, and Nettles, the patients who called themselves the Loonies.
Escape From Stargazer
Evolutionary biologist Casey Brackett was brought to the dam with a file that named a Class 4 incursion at Monterrey, McKenna's photograph, and a blurry humanoid in the trees. Inside the lab she watched the sedated hunter wake, kill the staff, and take a historic mask from a display case. That mask synced to the helmet in Rory's basement and showed a school tag: Rory Declan McKenna, Grade 6, Gordon Middle School. The stolen helmet was why the Fugitive went to the McKenna house.
The bus crashed a fence at the Stargazer dam while the Fugitive broke out of the lab. McKenna saw Casey chase the hunter along a catwalk, then she jumped onto the bus roof. Traeger ordered her killed for the questions she had asked and for a missing blood vial. The Loonies stole motorcycles from the motor pool, and McKenna rode one through the mercenary who had been about to shoot her. They hid at a bike festival and took a recreational vehicle. Casey woke among junk the Loonies had set out like offerings, took a shotgun, and put it down when McKenna told her Traeger's men had been ready to put a bullet in her head.
The Fugitive Tracks Rory
On the road Casey told McKenna the captive hunter carried human DNA and had been looking for missing gear. He understood that the missing gear was the pack he had mailed home. She had also seen, under a microscope, a fluid the species was using to upgrade itself. Traeger reached the McKenna house first and Emily sent him off. When Quinn called from the road, she realized the kitchen was full of black-ops men and destroyed the phone in the garbage disposal so the call could not be traced back to the bus.
Halloween Night In Georgia
Rory went trick-or-treating in the helmet and gauntlet Emily had not bought him, the gear from the basement instead of either costume she had picked. Heat signatures filled the eyepieces as he walked the neighborhood. A man on a porch threw a rotten apple at the mask, the helmet treated the impact as an attack, and a side cannon burned the doorway and the thrower. Rory dumped the helmet in the bushes and ran for the school field, which is where McKenna caught up with him after the Loonies reached town.
Two hunter dogs found him under the scoreboard. McKenna's car hit the first dog. Nebraska put a bolt through the second dog's skull, and that animal lived, later following the Loonies. The Fugitive was waiting on the roof of the RV, and the Upgrade Predator was close behind it.
Fight With The Fugitive Predator
Rory ran into Gordon Middle School. The jungle hunter followed, scanned McKenna, and went for a black remote that had fallen from the boy's hand, the device the Upgrade later called the Kujhad. An arm smashed through the corridor wall, crushed the smaller hunter's cannon, and knocked it aside. McKenna grabbed Rory and ran. The Upgrade killed the Fugitive in the street outside the school, before McKenna got Rory clear of the building. In the novelization, McKenna saw the Fugitive hanging in the lobby, a metal noose around its neck and its feet off the floor, until the Upgrade yanked the cord through the neck and the head hit the tiles. After that the Upgrade came for the boy.
The Barn And The Crash Site
A helicopter took McKenna, Casey, Nebraska, and Rory in a field after the school. Traeger wanted the remote and used the father as leverage, beating McKenna in a pen by a barn while Rory was left with a cryptographer. The boy had drawn a map of the crashed ship and gave a hatch code of fifteen digits. Traeger took him to the cloaked pod in the jungle. McKenna broke one man's arm, shot him, and freed Nebraska, and the rest of the Loonies came back in a stolen helicopter.
In the book he walked into the pod under a cloak marble, put a dart through a cryptographer's eye, and heard the Upgrade name him the prize before a five-minute head start. Lynch died on the ridge when the hunter's plasma found him, after he got a flare up. The film used the same leverage, the same pod, and the same run into the trees, and saved the armored suit for the end of the night.
The Fight In The Woods
Lynch had set claymores on a choke trail. Coyle and Baxley drew the Upgrade in with gunfire. The hunter refused the minefield until a stolen mask's side cannon knocked it onto the mines. Phosphorus and a flare set it on fire. Baxley stabbed an eye and died on a branch. A returning blade took Coyle's leg, and Coyle shot Baxley before he died in the dirt. Traeger's own shoulder cannon, stuck to his skull by a sensor, took his head off when he turned toward a shout.
The Upgrade Ship
McKenna stepped in front of the Upgrade and offered himself. The hunter threw him aside and took Rory. A larger ship decloaked. McKenna, Nebraska, and Nettles got onto the hull. Rory warned that a force field was coming up. The field cut Nettles down. In the film Nebraska slid into a turbine and died there, and that wrecked the engine. In the novel he slid off the rising shield and lived, and McKenna shot the consoles until the craft skipped across the water and threw the Upgrade out.
Rory triggered the shield again and cut the hunter's forearm off against the hull. In the novel, Casey wore the first hunter's gauntlet, the bolt-skulled dog brought back a bomb cuff, and McKenna loaded that charge onto a projectile from the severed arm. Two pistol rounds through the left eye finished the Upgrade. In the film the same arm supplies the shot that blows the hunter apart, and McKenna is the one who fires it. He walked out of the water with Rory and Casey.
The Predator Killer
Quinn and Rory later stood in a science lab while technicians opened cargo recovered from the Fugitive's ship. A scientist identified the pod as something the Fugitive had left on purpose, a gift so humans could meet the larger hunters on less unequal terms. A piece of the gear floated out of the container, locked onto a lab worker's hand, and built the Predator Killer suit around his body. The armor then shut off. McKenna, watching with Rory, said he would be the one to operate the suit.
Personality And Traits
McKenna was a practical soldier who treated the people with him as his responsibility. He stayed with the Loonies after the bus, took Casey Brackett with them when Traeger's men were ready to shoot her, and would not leave Nebraska Williams behind at the barn. The men who died on the trail were buried, and he spoke of them afterward as people who had been forgotten, not as a unit that had finished an assignment.
With his family he was direct and protective. The separation from Emily was already in place, and he treated Rory's mind as a fact of the boy rather than a problem to hide. When a larger hunter came for that boy, McKenna offered himself in Rory's place. The compassion and the rifle were the same habit: he put the people he had claimed between himself and the thing that was hunting them.
Weapons And Equipment
On the Mexico hillside McKenna carried a Springfield M1A in a JAE-100 stock, and he lost that rifle at the Fugitive's pod. In the cantina he had a SIG Sauer P226 in his waistband. After that his pistol was a tan FN FNP-45, which he carried into the last fight. He took a Glock 17 from one of Traeger's men and a Winchester Model 1300 Defender from a guard, and he pointed that shotgun at the Fugitive. In the school hallway he used a Heckler & Koch MP5A3. From the house he brought an AR-15-pattern carbine with tan furniture and an Aimpoint sight, and he fired it on full automatic later that night. Coyle tossed him a KRISS Vector, and McKenna also fired a Milkor MGL and handled a tranquilizer gun.
At the crash the Fugitive's wrist gauntlet locked onto his arm and fired once by accident. A cloak device from that gauntlet hid him on the run into town. He mailed the bio-mask and the gauntlet home. After the Upgrade's ship came down, he fired a wristblade from the severed arm into the hunter's leg, then shot it in the head with the pistol. In the lab he said he would operate the Predator Killer suit.
Behind The Scenes
Boyd Holbrook played Quinn McKenna after Benicio del Toro left the part over scheduling. Fox named Holbrook in October 2016, soon after he had played Pierce in Logan. Shane Black directed, with a script he wrote with Fred Dekker. Principal photography ran in British Columbia from February to June 2017. Holbrook prepared the lead with acting coach Terry Knickerbocker, a voice coach, and extra months of tactical training, because the part was much larger and more physical than his role in Logan. On a Vancouver set visit that spring he described Quinn as a man taking paid work in Mexico, separated from his family, and then placed on a bus with other military patients.
Test screenings led Fox to reshoot the third act in 2018. The first ending put McKenna and the Loonies with two Emissary Predators against the Upgrade, and Edward James Olmos had filmed General Woodhurst for that cut. Black said the original finish was too complicated, so the reshoot moved the last fight to night and replaced the team-up with the Predator Killer suit in the lab. Olmos's scenes were cut to shorten the release.
Famous Quotes
- "Target's down."
- "What the fuck was that?"
- "Mail this. Don't open it."
- "I saw an alien. A space alien."
- "They're gonna lock me up for what I saw."
- "I mailed it to myself."
- "My boy's got the gear."
- "That thing is going to my house."
- "Get away from my son."
- "You want me? Come and get me."
Conclusion
Quinn McKenna was the Ranger sniper who walked into the Monterrey crash, mailed a hunter's mask and gauntlet home, and dragged the Loonies off a Stargazer bus. The Fugitive died at the school. The Upgrade took Rory, lost an arm to the ship's shield, and died when McKenna fired the shot from that arm. In the film, Nettles, Coyle, Baxley, Lynch, and Nebraska died on the hunt. Casey was with him when the Upgrade died. The film ended in a lab, where Quinn and Rory watched that suit form around a technician, and Quinn said he would operate it.
Appearances
- The Predator (2018)
- The Predator novelization by Christopher Golden and Mark Morris (Titan Books, 2018)
Tag Categories: Predator Universe Characters | Predator Lore | Predator Hunt Survivors
