Kilkrazy wrote:I thought Alien vs Predator -- the one in the Antarctic pyramid -- was rather jolly.

The next one was a load of crap.

Empire wrote:John McTiernan’s muscular Predator, which pitted Arnold Schwarzenegger against an alien big game hunter, was a popular hit in 1987, but has struggled as a franchise. With Arnie replaced by Danny Glover in an underperforming Predator 2 and a pop culture profile maintained by comic book spin-offs (eg: Batman vs Predator), these also-ran ETs stayed on the star-map only by latching onto a more famous monster in game, comic and movie iterations of the Alien vs Predator concept. Predators can look down on Species, but only just.

This is essentially Predator 3, a dusted-off 1994 script by Robert Rodriguez (who produces) handed over to Nimrod Antal. It forgets anything post-Predator and spends a while on a different set-up which winds up delivering the same ingredients: sweaty macho grunts + jungle + alien huntsmen + killed-off one-by-one hardnuts + loner hero who seems to take this all personally. Alica Braga, playing an Israeli sniper, even looks like Predator heroine Elpidia Carrillo. Gawky Adrien Brody, cast effectively against type as a merc with malice, can’t fill Arnie’s fatigues – though when the shirt comes off, you can tell he’s logged serious gym time – and relies instead on a more Rodriguez-like simmering intensity with bursts of violence and tactical ruthlessness.

The supporting cast fall into the don’t-get-too-attached-because-they-won’t-be-here long category. The most interesting is the smart-suited, close-mouthed yakuza (Louis Ozawa Changchien), who slips off his shoes to wriggle his toes in offworld mud and performs the sword-moves in the best Earth vs Predatorworld duel scene. The rest are walking clichés: a Russian hulk (Oleg Taktarov), a chatty serial murderer (Walton Goggins), an African Death Squad killer (Mahershalalhashbaz Ali) and a Danny Trejo-type cocaine cartel hatchet man (unsurprisingly, Danny Trejo). A guest star shows up mid-film, and delivers a funny monologue, but the biggest missed opportunity is that – again – the monsters are conceived solely in terms of how cool they’ll look as action figures. Whatever characterisation they once had, mostly in Predator 2 and AvP admittedly, is dropped: we still don’t know why a spacefaring civilisation is so obsessed with big game hunting -- much less why they believe that hairstyle and those vests look better when not invisible.

Verdict
A solidly okay Saturday night effort, but unambitious considering the talent involved. Maybe Rodriguez should direct Predator Resurrection, but get a science fiction writer to script it.

3/5

Golden Eyed Scout wrote:I saw a katana wielded by a guy in a buisness suit in the trailer. It has to be good.

KingCracker wrote:
AVP - I was digging this movie until the Predator gave that chick the tribal alien get up. Then it went dumb FAST

Kanluwen wrote:

KingCracker wrote:
AVP - I was digging this movie until the Predator gave that chick the tribal alien get up. Then it went dumb FAST

That's them trying to shoe-horn the old Dark Horse "Aliens Versus Predator" comic plot in. In it, a colony was built upon a Predator hunting ground. A Hunt went bad, the young Predators doing their proving hunt died, the Xenomorphs got out and even had a Queen hatch(the first of many bad things to happen ), and a human woman named Yumiko rallied the few remaining colonists to essentially assault the Xenomorph Hive. As that happened, the Predators showed up to collect their young and instead found them dead from the Xenomorphs, and the Xenomorphs coming after the lone human survivor--who had just killed the Queen...