Harrigan Predator 2: Lieutenant Mike Harrigan

Mike Harrigan is the lead of Predator 2 (1990), directed by Stephen Hopkins, and the credits name him Lieutenant Mike Harrigan. Danny Glover plays him and holds the top billing on the cast list. He is a Los Angeles police lieutenant who ignores orders, which is exactly the habit that puts him in the Predator's path.

The film is set in the summer of 1997, when the city is baking in a record heat wave and Colombian and Jamaican drug gangs are fighting a bloody turf war. Harrigan leads a squad that includes detectives Leona Cantrell, Danny Archuleta and Jerry Lambert. After a run of unusually brutal killings, a federal task force led by Special Agent Peter Keyes takes over the scene and shuts him out. Harrigan starts to suspect that something far stranger than gang violence is hunting the city.

If you come from Predator (1987), the swap is easy to describe: the jungle is gone and the hunter now stalks a concrete city. Harrigan is a cop where Dutch Schaefer was a mercenary leader, and he works inside a chain of command he keeps ignoring. The creature is billed as The Predator and played by Kevin Peter Hall, the same actor billed in the first film.

Harrigan starts Predator 2 as a lieutenant who is pushed away from his own investigation, and he ends it as the only person still standing between the creature and the city. Peter Keyes and his federal task force take over the killings because they want the hunter taken alive, and that goal leaves Harrigan watching from the edge of the crime scenes.

The cost of that sidelining shows up quickly. Danny Archuleta slips back to a scene by himself, picks up one of the creature's spear tips and dies for it. Harrigan's visit to the Jamaican boss King Willie ends with the Predator killing the man and taking his head. Then comes the subway, where Jerry Lambert dies and Leona Cantrell lives, because the creature's scanners show that she is pregnant.

Keyes finally springs his slaughterhouse trap, and the Predator tears through most of his team. Harrigan wounds it, and Keyes goes down under a thrown disc. From there the arc turns personal: a rooftop pursuit, the removal of the creature's self destruct device, and a descent into an underground spacecraft. Harrigan ends the fight there by using the creature's own disc against it.

Harrigan's relationships are defined by who he trusts and who gets in his way. His squad is Leona Cantrell, Danny Archuleta and Jerry Lambert, played by María Conchita Alonso, Rubén Blades and Bill Paxton. Archuleta and Lambert both die to the Predator before the finale, and Cantrell is the one the creature chooses to spare.

His rival is Peter Keyes, played by Gary Busey, the federal agent who takes over the investigation. Keyes wants the creature alive and treats Harrigan as an obstacle, so the two are opposed until Keyes is killed by the thrown disc. The cast list also includes Robert Davi as Captain Phil Heinemann and Adam Baldwin as Garber.

Then there is the Predator itself, the one relationship that matters at the end. Harrigan faces it on a rooftop and in the spacecraft, and he wins by turning its own weapon against it. Later, he is linked to Dutch Schaefer, the hero of the first film, through the extended ending of Predator: Killer of Killers, which shows both men among frozen captives. For the creature side of the story, see the Predator creature page, and for the other human lead see Dutch Predator.

Harrigan survives Predator 2, and what happens to him afterward comes down to one gift and one cameo. After he kills the Predator, a group of cloaked Predators appears and takes away the body. Their leader hands Harrigan an antique flintlock pistol engraved "Raphael Adolini 1715" as a reward. The ending leaves the sense that the Predators will return.

The next time Harrigan appears is in the extended ending of Predator: Killer of Killers, added on July 25, 2025 to the film that streamed on Hulu on June 6, 2025. After Ursa is returned to cryogenic storage, the extended cut shows Dutch Schaefer and Mike Harrigan among the frozen captives. One of the pods in the same facility holds Naru from Prey (2022).

In my opinion, Harrigan's best moments come when the film lets a cop outthink a hunter. The best of them is the subway scene, where Harrigan is not even the target. The Predator spares a pregnant Cantrell after its scanners read her, and it changes how the audience reads the creature: it is a hunter with rules, not a slasher.

It could be argued that the rooftop chase is the real set piece. Harrigan cuts off the self destruct device, which denies the creature its usual way out, and then follows it down into the spacecraft beneath the city. Killing it with its own disc is a neat reversal of the thrown weapon that killed Keyes. In the first film Dutch wins with mud and a log trap, whereas Harrigan wins with the creature's own tools, and that difference is the best comparison between the two heroes.

The pistol is the closing beat, and it works because it is so small. A group of cloaked Predators collects the dead hunter, and their leader gives a Los Angeles cop an old gun engraved "Raphael Adolini 1715". For a film that otherwise runs on heat, gang gunfire and slaughterhouse carnage, that gesture of respect is the moment I would show a newcomer first.