Predators

A follow up to the 80s action 'classics' (let's face the originals are both kind of ropey albeit entertaining) Predators sees a band of survivors thrown together in a mysterious jungle to battle eponymous creatures.

Right, so yes they are on an alien planet but no there are nowhere near as many Predators involved as you have been led to believe. (To the point where one part of the trailer is a complete lie). Our group of characters nee disposable ciphers are all vicious killers of one type or another but sadly most of the fail to carve out any kind of memorable feature.

Leading the lot is Adrien Brody doing his best Christian Bale as Batman impression as some kind of tough but honorable underneath mercenary soldier, the type essayed so much better by Vin Diesel in Pitch Black. Suffice to say he really doesn't convince, nor does Alice Braga in the standard tough woman role who just doesn't make you believe this woman is a soldier, it's a part that should have gone to Michelle Rodriguez who plays this type of part in her sleep.

Elsewhere Laurence Fishburne is entertainingly mad in a brief appearance about halfway through and Topher Grace's character at least has some development but it is left far too late to really make much of impact on things.

So the characters aren't that interesting, what about the action? Sadly this isn't great either. There is less of it than you would of thought and when it does arrive unfortunately director(and Robert Rodriquez understudy)Nimród Antal makes it hard to really tell what is going on for large parts and fails to inject any sense of excitement into other parts.

Take for example an early section where are group of survivors are attacked by alien dogs things. They all turn and start blasting away with their various weapons...and apparently hit nothing at all as the dogs keep coming. Even the girl with the sniper rifle is just blasting away and the guy firing the minigun which should be destroying the forest (a la the first film) is doing no damage to anything, anywhere. Of course as the scene moves on our 'heroes' become deadly accurate as needed by the beats of the action.

"We're much better than these guys"

It's not helped by the Predators themselves which seems to act in different ways depending on what the script dictates. At first they creep around using their camo tech to sneak up and skewer people, then they seem happy to just blast away with their shoulder canons before illogically accepting stand up sword fights with a Yakuza gangster wielding a samurai sword in an open field.

We even have a Predator vs Predator fight for no clearly explained reason but even this is unengaging. In fact nothing interesting is done with the Predators themselves, they just become fairly unimaginative monsters. You could probably replace them with any other cinematic boogie man without really changing the film. They simply turn up, kill people, vanish, turn up again and them get themselves killed in idiotic ways.

It's like someone put together a list of cool things to have in a Predator movie (see the above mentioned samurai sword wielding Yakuza), scratched their heads to string them to together and threw in a couple of references to the original and filmed that.

Unfortunately this means you're left with a film everybit as unfocused, underdeveloped and half cocked as that makes it sound. In short it's very disappointing to the point where I'd say AVP: Alien vs Predator is a much better Predator film than this one.