2010 sequelRating: 6/20
Plot: The titular alien things get tired of fighting against King Kong or whoever the studio responsible for these predator movies had them fighting in the last movie and decide to do a nearly shot-for-shot remake of the first movie (Predator) that had only a single alien thing (the titular Predator) but a real blockbuster action hero (Arnold Swarzeneggar). It's highly-trained humans with ludicrous weapons trying to survive being hunted by the predators on the latter's home planet.
After a sharp in-medias-res intro in which Brody spills from the sky, this turns into a one-note predictable actioner that wears out its welcome long before the black character dies. Well, the first black character. The biggest problem is that I can't buy Adrian Brody as an action hero. He's got a silly looking gun that looks like something I could buy at a Big 'n' Tall kiddy toy store and looks like the nerdy kid down the street who invited the neighborhood kids over to play army. But they only show up because his mother is kind of hot and has popsicles. The nice popsicles, too--not those cheap things that you have to suck out of the plastic tubes. Brody adopts this tough guy grizzly voice that makes it clear he spent a little money on Christian Bale's "How to Almost Ruin a Movie Using Only a Ridiculous Voice" set of instructional dvd's. The other characters--the guy from Machete (Trejo) since people who make movies like this think that including somebody like that will automatically make a movie better, some chick who might have been on Lost, and a bunch of other stock characters. Oh, and Laurence Fishburne who plays the same kind of guy he always does. I'm sure the poorly written dialogue doesn't help, but Fishburne's performance really stinks in this. He did give me a pretty sweet pick-up line if Jennifer ever decides to leave me and forces me to be a predator again myself. All I would need to do in my hunt for Wife #2 would be to saunter over to a pretty lady at a discotheque or fast food restaurant and say (in my most Fishburney cadence): "Smelled you since you got here." Yeah, I know. If I had female readers, they'd be melting right about now. This has constant music burbling below the surface, and almost every scene is assembled with this artificial suspense. But almost every scene seems extraneous since this movie never really goes anywhere. To illustrate, there's a scene with a bunch of booby traps (none which work) which seems to be the story's way of showing the audience that something might possibly happen at some point in the movie. There's a climactic fight scene where you can barely tell what's going on because there's a glare on the television from the motel lobby lights, but I honestly didn't even care what was going on at that point. I was just hoping that Brody would somehow use his nose to defeat the predators. And don't get me started on the CGI-porcupine monkeys. I think this set special effects back ten years or so.
Most ludicrous line: A character named Stans says that when they make it back home, he can't wait to do a bunch of cocaine and rape women. "I'll be like, what time is it? Five o'clock? Damn. Time to rape me some fine bitches." See, maybe it's just jealousy, but I'm really bugged that somebody is making money writing that crap.
Gene Siskel's ghost, by the way, liked this a lot more than I did. Then again, there's a guy who enjoyed raping bitches in his spare time, so he probably connected more with the characters than I did.
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